dtrace discuss - Aug 2008 - SunRay server suitable for DTrace class?

Dear all.
Will a SunRay server work for doing a introduction class on DTrace or will 
there be conflicts if about 15 people launch similar scripts at the same 
time?

Thanks for your help
Thomas

-----------------------------------------------------------------
GPG fingerprint: B1 EE D2 39 2C 82 26 DA  A5 4D E0 50 35 75 9E ED

> Will a SunRay server work for doing a introduction class on DTrace or will 
> there be conflicts if about 15 people launch similar scripts at the same 
> time?
DTrace allows multiple clients to be active at the same time so there should
be no problem or adverse interactions other than the obvious issues of memory
consumption on the system and an increase in the amount of activity on the
system due to DTrace itself.

Adam

-- 
Adam Leventhal, Fishworks                     http://blogs.sun.com/ahl

Thomas,

One of the things that should be interesting is to watch how all of your
student''s DTrace scripts are lock-stepped when you''re playing
with the
profile provider, and everyone is triggering off of the same profile
probe.

Chip
> -----Original Message-----
> From: dtrace-discuss-bounces at opensolaris.org [mailto:dtrace-discuss-
> bounces at opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Nau
> Sent: Monday, August 11, 2008 12:55 PM
> To: dtrace-discuss at opensolaris.org
> Subject: [dtrace-discuss] SunRay server suitable for DTrace class?
> 
> Dear all.
> Will a SunRay server work for doing a introduction class on DTrace or
> will
> there be conflicts if about 15 people launch similar scripts at the
> same
> time?
> 
> Thanks for your help
> Thomas
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> GPG fingerprint: B1 EE D2 39 2C 82 26 DA  A5 4D E0 50 35 75 9E ED
> _______________________________________________
> dtrace-discuss mailing list
> dtrace-discuss at opensolaris.org

Hey Thomas:

I just did a DTrace class on SunRays last week at an internal Sun Event,
We used VMWare SXE as the backend and created individual Virtual
machines for each participant. We had two pretty large servers at our
disposal so it worked ok. Please let me know if you need details but as
a summary these virtual machines showed up as separate machines
and we used DHCP and SRS magic to map them to individual Sunray
desktops.

Some advantages:
	* We were able to accomplish with two machine what would have
		taken 24 desktops
	* We used snapshot & rollback to reset the class and ran it again
		in 30 minutes for 24 more participants. Pretty easy to do.

Some disadvantages in this approach
	* It was pretty heavy weight. We had two systems with 64GB of ram
		many cores. So nor sure how well it scales for you.
	* We had many copies of the same exact image on the server. It
		all seemed a huge waste of disk space.
	* Every on accessed the same server so there were network issues.
		that made it a little hard for a few.

Why not use Virtual Box?
	I''ve also set up my class on virtual box. The idea here is to create a
virtual box image  with everything setup. Then let the students copy the
image into their laptops and use virtual box to run off it. This way  
they
get a "take way" once they are done with the class. I''ve
setup such an
image with OpenSolaris.

My DTrace class has over 16 exercises and is self running. It has  
material
on C, C++, PHP, JavaScript, Java, Java 7.0 Java DTrace Api, chime and
DTrace C API among other things. With all this set up the Virtual box
image was about 3GB.

You are more than welcome to reuse my material and the virtual box
image.

Please let me know if I can be of any help

Angelo

On Aug 11, 2008, at 1:55 PM, Thomas Nau wrote:
> Dear all.
> Will a SunRay server work for doing a introduction class on DTrace  
> or will
> there be conflicts if about 15 people launch similar scripts at the  
> same
> time?
>
> Thanks for your help
> Thomas
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> GPG fingerprint: B1 EE D2 39 2C 82 26 DA  A5 4D E0 50 35 75 9E ED
> _______________________________________________
> dtrace-discuss mailing list
> dtrace-discuss at opensolaris.org