Idle Linux Server Resource Requirement Study

An idle linux server running with default/recommended settings can use considerable resource. The following RedHat linux servers running under VM are completely idle. You should understand your requirements prior to committing to thousands of servers - your hardware resource might not be sufficient to meet the demand. These reports are based on a 24 hour period. Not much analysis is required of idle servers, thus the granularity is not important for this example.

Analysis:

Processor requirements: are about .3% of a processor on this size box. On a P390, our numbers are about 4%. This converts roughly to 5 linux servers per MIP. Note that some effort is going in to reducing this requirement.

Storage requirements: are very close to the virtual machine size. In these cases, the machines that are defined at 128MB have working sets of 128MB (MRHAT016 for example).

DASD I/O: About 1 per minute are executed by these Red Hat servers. 

Report: ESAUSR2      User Resource Utilization
Monitor initialized:                      on 9672 serial
--------------------------------------------------------
         <---CPU time--> <----Main Storage (pages)----->
/Class   Total  Virt Rat Totl Activ  -ed Totl Activ  Avg
UserID   <(seconds)> T:V  Lock <-----WSS----->
-------- ----- ----- --- ---- ----- ---- ---- ----- ----
01/17/01
MRHAT003  1523  1464 1.0  12K 12416    0  12K 12413  27K
MRHAT004 262.2 149.1 1.8  18K 17712    0  18K 17683  18K
MRHAT016 242.7 128.7 1.9  33K 32734    0  33K 32727  33K
MRHAT011 231.8 126.7 1.8  32K 32219    0  32K 32212  32K
MRHAT015 225.1 106.7 2.1  16K 15960    0  16K 15931  16K
MRHAT012 218.2 119.6 1.8  19K 19493    0  19K 19464  19K
 
 
 
 
Report: ESAUSR3
Monitor initialized:                      on 9672 seria
-------------------------------------------------------
                DASD MDisk Virt <---Virtual Device---->
UserID    DASD Block Cache Disk <----I/O Requests----->
/Class     I/O   I/O  Hits  I/O  Cons   U/R  CTCA Other
-------- ----- ----- ----- ---- ----- ----- ----- -----
MRHAT003 23473     0  1941    0    33    15 99521     0
MRHAT004  2513     0   150    0     0     0  6388     0
MRHAT016  2110     0   121    0    11     0     0     0
MRHAT011  1784     0   113    0     0     0   336     0
MRHAT015  1300     0     0    0     0     0     0     0
MRHAT012  2742     0    32    0     0     0 15891     0