October 8, 2006
MySQL i386 version verses x86_64 on a supermicro motherboard
Recently we purchased several new machines. Ok, motherboard, chassis form super-micro. Specifically the X7DBE+ motherboard version 2.01 and 4U chassis with 4 Gigs of DDR II 667MHz memory which was buffered. We tried loading the Test release of Fedora Core 6 (5.92) which was released on Sept12, 2006. Well that didn’t go very well the GRUB loader can’t handle memory over 4 gigs and gives you an Error 32:. Which by the way has been reported to Redhat on Bugzilla. Apparently I was not the only one with this issue. Hopeful now that they have delayed the release of FC6 they will have time to fix this issue before it gets released.
Then I tried FC5 x86_64 bit version. Well that didn’t recognize the e1000 Intel Giga Bit Ethernet ports that come on the motherboard. So after much scratching of the head we added a PCI ethernet NIC card to the motherboard and proceeded to load FC5. Everything loaded fine on the motherboard However, when we loaded the MYSQL cluster onto the machines. The response time was worst than if I was running i386 on 1 Gig old workstations which is what we put together to get a test cluster working to make sure that we could do what we wanted in a production environment.
I got so mad that I called Redhat and asked for Pre-Sales Engineering. They gave me a 30 day free eval of Redhat Enterprise AS edition update 4. I proceeded to load it on to my first API server in the cluster and everything worked but I was still getting a very slow response time from the MySQL cluster. Oh, and by the way it recognized all my onboard Nic cards and processor and memory without any issues.
So as I was just about to throw in the towel and go back to the i386 version of software on everything I though, “ok I will continue to load the rest of the cluster with the 30 day eval version of the software and see what happens”.
My setup is 4 storage nodes and 1 manager and 2 API servers. As I finished loading the 4th storage node and took the manager down to start reloading it something wonderful happened. The cluster started responding very fast. So I finished loading up the manager with the same version of the OS. Now I am going to have to figure out how to get support for all these machines and stay in budget for my department. Ouch. Redhat on there website wants 2500 per server for 24/7 support. I hope I can figure out something.
