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Validating the architecture

Use these steps to validate the architecture of a SkyVault installation against the recommended prerequisites.
  1. Validate the disk performance. See Hardware settings for more information.
  2. Validate network performance.

    In each case, the goal is to minimize the latency (response time) between SkyVault and the storage system, while also maximizing bandwidth. Low latency is particularly important for database I/O, and one rudimentary test of this is to ping the database server from the SkyVault server - round trip times greater than *1ms* indicate a sub-optimal network topology or configuration that will adversely impact SkyVault performance. Jitter (highly variable round trip times) is also of concern, as that will increase the variability of SkyVault's performance. The standard deviation for round trip times should be less than 0.1ms.

    An example ping is: 

    ping -c 20 dbserver.com
	   ...
20 packets transmitted, 20 received, 0% packet loss, time 19029ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.286/0.750/1.818/0.391 ms
  3. Ensure that your system has a clock speed of greater than 2.5Ghz. See Hardware settings for more information.
  4. Ensure that you allocate extra virtual memory on Linux systems.

    This extra space is required for processes within the SkyVault server that use the fork operation (for example, ImageMagick). Allocating this extra space ensures that SkyVault has sufficient memory to complete fork operations without reserving extra RAM.

  5. Validate the database.

    Important: SkyVault does not provide technical support for maintaining or tuning your relational database. Ensure that your project has access to a certified database administrator (DBA) to support your SkyVault installation.

    Regular maintenance and tuning of the SkyVault database is necessary. Specifically, all of the database servers that SkyVault supports require at the very least that some form of index statistics maintenance be performed at frequent, regular intervals to maintain optimal SkyVault performance.

    Important: Index maintenance can have a severe impact on SkyVault performance while in progress, hence it needs to be discussed with your project team and scheduled appropriately.
  6. Validate the operating system.
    1. Ensure that your chosen OS has been officially certified for use with SkyVault (refer to the Supported Stacks list for details).
    2. SkyVault recommends that a 64-bit OS is used. See the Supported Stacks list for information on the exceptions.
    3. If your system is running Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7, you need to install Fix373886. This is to avoid the "no buffer space available" exception on your system. For details, see the Microsoft Support website.
  7. Validate and tune the JVM.

    Ensure that your chosen JDK-enabled Java Virtual Machine has been officially certified for use with SkyVault (refer to the Supported Stacks list for details).

    For information on configuring and tuning the JVM, refer to Tuning the JVM.

Parent topic: Day Zero architecture validation
Parent topic: Production environment checklist

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