| Title: | DEC TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS |
| Notice: | Note 2-SSB Kits, 3-FT Kits, 4-Patch Info, 7-QAR System |
| Moderator: | ucxaxp.ucx.lkg.dec.com::TIBBERT |
| Created: | Thu Nov 17 1994 |
| Last Modified: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Last Successful Update: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Number of topics: | 5568 |
| Total number of notes: | 21492 |
Hi,
A customer has a cluster with several nodes and he would like to know
if BOOTP requests can be controlled in terms of who services the
request. He would like the least busy system to handle the load
request. All of his cluster nodes can service the request, but it
seems that the first node that gets the request will address the
request.
Any way to get load balancing? Would this be an imposible suggestion
enhancement if it is not currently doable?
Thanks,
-Rick
| T.R | Title | User | Personal Name | Date | Lines |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5178.1 | not much of an answer but ... | UTRTSC::KNOPPERS | Oswald Knoppers | Fri Jan 31 1997 02:26 | 11 |
I guess the host who replies the most quickly will service the request. One could say this is some sort of load balancing. But I don't really understand, is this customer actually having such an enormous amount of bootp/tftp traffic that this is a significant contributiont to the load on his systems? Normally one would expect some load in the morning when devices (like printers or terminal servers) are powered on but during the rest of the (production) day the amount of requests is normally minimal. Oswald | |||||
| 5178.2 | try this... | UCXAXP::GRADY | Squash that bug! (tm) | Fri Jan 31 1997 10:55 | 26 |
The short answer is no.
Seems like a lot of effort for a relatively trivial gain. Try
suggesting that the customer segment their bootp client population
among several servers. The protocol itself doesn't support this sort
of arrangement, and is first-come-first-served oriented. DHCP is a
little more intelligent about competing servers but neither was ever
intended to be a distributed application.
Another suggestion would be to lower the default priority of the bootp
server process to 3 or 4, so the responsiveness of the server is more
indicative of the relative load on the system - the default out of the
box is very high, 8 I think, and it's really not necessary (vestigial
default from the V2.0 days). In this way, the server will run more
slowly as a function of system load because it will compete fairly with
other users. Systems with heavier loads won't respond as quickly and
the service load will tend to be more distributed, while the bootp load
on each system will be more reasonable.
How's that?
tim
P.S. The customer might want to look into a UPS too, if they keep
rebooting everything so often. ;-)
| |||||