Senthil Anand Subbanan
senanand@hotmail.com
Sizing!!Why
it is important? Home and Business users are in constant need for a machine to
suit power hungry applications and requirements. To keep up to speed with
market demands and meet business enhancement requirements, it is important to
understand what is involved in choosing the correct hardware and once it is
chosen, how to find an optimal setting to satisfy the demand.
The
architecture shown is for a typical enterprise production website with
clustered applications including Web Server, Application Server and the
database server. Using Adobe Flex, the visualization attempts to educate the
user by interacting with the system to understand the importance of sizing and
to simulate this system with various attributes to understand the system
behavior.
List of
key attributes used are
a. CPU
b. Memory
c. Disk Type
/ Activity
d. System
Specific Parameter (Applicable to application running on the platform)
e. Sliders
to adjust (user threads, refresh interval)
f. Text Box
/ Drop Down / Radio button for the user to edit data
g. Tabbed
structure to navigate around various tabs.
h. Live
refreshing charts to simulate the real time behavior of the system.
i. Tooltip
for help
j. Auto Enable
/ Disable based on selected values.
k. When you
click on the chart line, you can change the color from the palette.
On an
enterprise, not every member knows details about various systems involved to
support a selected application. For example, Web Administrator and Database
Administrator might be a different person. This visualization helps both users
to view and work together to understand what the impact will be based on
individual system specific changes and capacity.
Implementation
Approach:
I have
used Adobe Flex Web 2.0 to implement this visualization. In order to execute,
please open the html file as Flex generates Flash file.
Software
needed: Firefox or IE with Flash enabled.
Simulation
Features:
Tab:
Simulation
o
Concurrent Connections: Â List of active
concurrent connections. User can increase / decrease connection real time
during simulation
o
Start / Stop / Clear - Simulation
can be started / paused with Stop or can be cleared
o
For each system, it has two
visualization components
·
Dynamic Color Coding based on
simulated data
·
Chart with real time feed based
on simulated data
Tab:
Setup
Setup tab
can be used to configure the system with basic attributes. This tab can be
further enhanced to place more values to show much accurate result.
1. Open
the html file in a browser Click here to launch Visualization
2.
Navigate to setup Tab: Choose RAM, CPU, Disk Type (SAN is faster), Number of
Web Server or App Server and values specific to the three server types.
3.
Navigate back to Simulation, adjust the refresh interval as needed and click
start
4. While
the simulation is running, user can navigate back to setup tab to test how
hardware changes will affect the system performance and it also addresses a
fail over situation. (Changing number of Web Servers from 2 to 1 depicts the
failover of a Web Server. Same for App Server as well)
5. Review
how the system performance with data visualized in two sections.
6. User
can click Stop for Pausing or Click Clear after Stop to clear all the results