1.0 Novell Filr 1.1: Test Report—Workload Scalability/Capacity (OES)

White Paper - September 2014

To plan an optimal Filr deployment, administrators need information about Filr’s activity-workload-handling capacity. The workload-activities are generated by Filr clients sending requests to the Filr virtual appliances. The actual number of users or files are not necessarily the most important factors when it comes to scalability, but rather the level of activities performed by the users of the Filr system.Novell Testing measured Filr’s activity-workload-handling capacity by gauging the effect that different file-related user activities had on the test bed illustrated below in this document. The workload was optimized by monitoring CPU usage and keeping system response times at a reasonable level.Depending on the activity workload that an organization’s users generate, a Filr deployment similar to the test bed used in our scalability testing would be able to serve between 1000 and 2000 users. It’s important to remember that the actual workload capacity is a function of the number of user activities, not the number of Filr users. There are obviously other factors too, such as host server hardware used, available RAM, network bandwidth, database back-end performance etc.

This white paper describes the methodology used by Novell in testing Filr 1.1 scalability, as well as the scalability test results and findings. Filr administrators can use the results presented for extrapolation when planning their own Filr deployment. Following the recommendations in the Novell Filr 1.1 Planning and Deployment Best Practices Guide, and sizing the system so that it can adequately scale according to requirements, will ensure a successful Filr deployment.

Novell testing utilized a test bed with the components illustrated in the following graphics.

The diagram below shows the test bed used for our scalability testing. Please note that we used one single Filr virtual appliance, one Filr MySQL appliance and one Filr Search appliance. You can increase the number of Filr virtual appliances in order to handle more workload activities. Novell has currently tested and certified a system with 5 Filr virtual appliances. We recommend customers work with Novell Consulting in order to plan and deploy a system larger than that.