IDOL Autonomy Servers

[Rockapot]

Anyone running IDOL Autonomy servers in their VMware environment?

I am going to be building 10 x Autonomy servers for a Web Development & Test tier and was interested to see anyone's experience with cloning these servers.

I have extensive experience of ESX clone's and P2V conversions with other servers however no experience in cloning Autonomy servers and wondered if anyone else does?

The first virtual Autonomy server will be built by an Autonomy consultant and whilst I will be asking the consultant about this I am always interested in getting feedback from the VMTN forum members.

Really just want to see if cloning these servers is straightforward or a bit like the SQL clone subject (no one really likes cloning already built SQL box's etc...)

Thanks in advance...

Carl

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Moved to the virtual machine and guest os forum.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

SearchVMware Blog: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/virtualization-pro/

Blue Gears Blogs - http://www.itworld.com/ and http://www.networkworld.com/community/haletky

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[Rockapot]

Just a follow up on this incase anyone else decided to clone IDOL Autonomy servers.., its all flat file so a clone and resid goes through with out issues.

Carl

[klaasm1]

I've virtualized a an IDOL Autonomy Server last weekend but the performace was realy poor and I can't seem to figure out why. During peek hours in the morning I noticed a high activity from content.exe 70% - 80%. And clients where getting time outs.

The physical machine was a proliant dl380 G5 with 4 cpu's and 4 GB RAM running win2003 Ent. SP2

The virtual server has the same configuration.

Any tips on improving the performance?

[Rockapot]

Sorry cant help here.., only tested the P2V on a fresh install virtual so basically a V2V. I have not had a chance to run the IDOL box's on production ESX hosts yet however they will be running on DL380 G5's as ESX hosts so can report back in a few weeks and provide some info on this as I am sure I will have some more insight in to this area then.

Carl

[mancgolfer]

I'd check the fetch process indexing into IDOL Server. IDOL Server is mutithreaded when querying but not when indexing, and therefore CPU and Memory use increases dramatically when IDOL Server is indexing.

If HTTPFetch, FileSystemFetch (or whatever connector being used) is indexing into IDOL Server during the morning, this would explain the issue you're having. You can check this by looking in the content_index.log situated in the IDOLServer/IDOL/logs folder.

If this is the case, I would ask your Autonomy consultant to change the time of the indexing process to out of business hours unless there's a business reason for indexing at this time.

The other thing to check would be that delayedsync=true exists in the IDOL Server config (IDOLServer/IDOL/AutonomyIDOL.cfg), as IDOL Server processes each IDX or XML file it receives immediately, writing to disc each time. If delayedsync=true and maxdelay=300 then IDOL server will only write to disc every 300 seconds or when the index cache is full. This also increases performance considerably when indexing.

Hope this helps.