Server Performance Comparison

[James Dugger]

​On ​

​2015-01-26 12:09pm Matt Graham wrote:​

> This sounds like a failure of sysadminning.


​Yes, but is it Sys admin or more of a Dev/Ops issue?.

It's fairly easy to generate a kickstart (automated installation) file for
> RHEL/CentOS, which can install all the ordinary packages from the standard
> RHEL/CentOS repos.  The kickstart file can also run an arbitrary shell
> script after all the packages are installed, which'd get additional repos
> and the packages in them and so forth.  I did this for the last round of
> physical server installs; we could get a physical machine from "has no OS"
> to "running all the stuff" fairly quickly.


Kickstart, (RHEL-based), pre
​se​
ed, or preseed plus kickstart (Debain/Ubuntu) for base server installs are
a given, especially for installs on physical servers.
​  ​
​
​
​These go without saying. Building a 3-tier web, data, file server system,
installing and configuring the stack for the specific enterprise
application, and then spinning it up all from a versioned source code, IMHO
are better handled by provisioners such as Vagrant, Packer and other
configuration managers.

Or was this more like "we didn't think about anything but Ubuntu until the
> last minute"?

​It was actually the opposite.  The team struggled to complete the upgrades
to extensions, modules, new applications, ini/config changes etc and
migrating to the existing RHEL environment.  As an independent test case
the same application stack and environment was built using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Servers.  It was completely rebuilt, destroyed, re-configured, and re-built
3 times in the same time frame.


Some things that can be useful (imagemagick, for one) can have dependencies
> on X11 libraries.  Some things like LibreOffice require a running X server
> but can also be used to do things like convert PDFs to MSWord in an
> automated fashion.  (The guy I was talking to who needed to do that used
> Xvfb to fake an X server....)


I use imagemagick on the web server to process images (in Drupal).
Installation of the X11 libraries and the php extensions are done by script
through the provisioner. What I meant is that they do not require that a
full desktop environment be installed on the server to manually access the
server and use this feature.  However perhaps I was unclear, I was
referring to the comment regarding bloat.  I assume that the bloat referred
to in previous comments was due to the "belief" that Ubuntu server had to,
a) be installed graphically, and b) that it always installs "bloat" or
extra processes that need to be removed or shut down.

Did you mean "human labor"?  Installing junk on a server feels a lot more
> like labor than capital to me if you go by economic terms.  (Buzzwords
> don't tend to respect things like dictionaries or previous word usages
> though.)--


​No, I meant capital  (I am an Economics graduate).  A corporations human
capital in micro economic terms is a function of the value of relevant
knowledge and experience in aggregate of its human resources (employees).
The cost of human capital (in one form) is inversely proportional to the
value of a process that can replace it (the human). The more processes that
require less expertise but produce greater returns on investment that
company "A" has as compared to company "B"; the smaller the human capital
cost of company "A".  While human capital is considered a company's most
valuable resource it is still by far the single biggest cost per unit value
of any of its resources. In other words faster/easier server implementation
with fewer needed human experts to build and maintain them equals potential
lower human capital costs.

Not sure what you mean by "junk".  I am commenting based on 2 premises: 1)
The server build/examples I have given have been made production ready, and
2) Ubuntu server is equal to the task of being a production web server.

James

*Linkedin <http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-h-dugger/15/64b/74a/>*
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