ProsconsGWonwindows
From CoolSolutionsWiki
-my other wikis
my experience
- GW backend troubleshooting is more difficult on windows than Linux/nw groupwise
- very difficult to get bug fixes fixed on windows
- GW on windows IS supported, but is NOT recommended. Trunk of the tree is running GW on Linux.
- I recently viewed one of my customer's POA stats. Over 210 days for a Post Office up and running on Linux! Rock solid stability and performance!
Other's experience
"In our environment, we did find some performance issues with running GW on Windows -- which the customer is working around. My customer is running a 6 or 8 node Windows cluster with 5 POs, a domain, and other pieces on it. They share a SAN with windows file & print cluster as well. The F&P is running low disk utilization. The GW resources run very high (>= 95% disk utilization based on I/O). Given all of the GW resources are sharing the same spindles, they started getting hurt after a while as mail built up -- and backup times extended out 300%-500% of original and of that on NetWare. Go figure! Their resolution has been to move to faster drives (15,000 RPM) in the SAN and larger stripes -- 15 disk arrays vs. 4-7. Their performance has gotten backups down to < 4 hours -- vs. the 14-20 they had been.
They also purchased a tool to help keep the disk de-fragmented. I don't know how much it will help in the long run but they were > 60% fragmented after a year of uptime."
- recap
- Performance issues (unhappy end users?)
- High CPU utilization
- Slow IO disk performance on windows
- Bad disk fragmentation
- Slow backup performance
- Poor high availability solution
How about virtualizing SLES inside win2008, and having the sles serverrunning GW?
Here are my thoughts on this:
- uncommon configuration, not trunk of the tree. Most customers do not run in this configuration.
- one expert says, so long as it is NOT a PO server...given the IO requirements
- The POA MUST have 500 mb IO, otherwise GW users will be unhappy with the performance
- Often, when there are support issues, we can only troubleshoot the application...while there are many other factors such as OS/hardware etc, now we add another layer of complexity.
- still researching
