Does anyone use PolyServe?
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Does anyone have any comments about PolyServe? We are looking at this tool for a combination of consolidation/high-availability solution. The problem is that the net is splattered with their white-papers and "articles"... I cannot find any objective opinions about this tool.
Is there anyone who is using this tool or looked at it and decided against it?
Thanks!
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Hello Ed,
We are having it installed next week. So far they have been very helpful. They were independent when we signed the contract but about a month ago, they were acquired by HP. We run HP blade servers so it wasn't a big deal for us and they can work with our IBM DS8100 san.
For us, it came down to solving business problems and we thought this would be best. Currently we have three active passive systems (1->2, 3->4 and 5->6). As such we have three boxes basically sitting idle just getting data mirrored to them and we are talking some serious horsepower and about 45K in cost. We were using DoubleTake to mirror the data and manage the failover. While DoubleTake worked very well for the mirroring of data, DoubleTake was batting about 30% sucecess with the failover part and when it did, it was nasty failing back.
With the Polyserve solution, we are able to store all the MDF & LDF's on a SAN (a SAN is a requirement for their solution...so no mirroring) and each server becomes active (I just gained 3 db servers for processing) and can fail over to each other depending on how you setup your failover matrix (takes about 10 to 30 seconds to failover the SQL instance). We are also managing upwards of 600 databases and this give me the ability to move them around much easier when their performance starts to spike, I can easily move them from a busy server to one that is less busy.
Also, the Polyserve solution makes it easy for us to deploy new servers into the matrix (2000 can coexist with 2005 SQL Servers in the same matrix and they can be either 32 bit or 64 bit). It has tools to automate the installs, patches and bug fixes for SQL. It does have an extensive command line interface that I am using to code with so that I can setup some performance monitors and automagically move things around to be proactive.
Another nice thing is the virtualization. In the old system when we had to move a database from one cluster to another, we have to change web config files/connection strings so the apps knew where the databases were located. This was a mess when you needed to move 10 or 20 databases. With Polyserve they have virtualized this. We point our connection strings to a virutal IP address and then behind the scenes Polyserve knows where the DB resides and it manages this so we can easily move a db or instance from on server to another without have to change any of our connection strings.
It's not cheap but with the savings and benefits we should be able to have it pay for itself within a years time. Just by allowing us to use the three idle servers, we are getting a bump of 45K.
I will be blogging (http://blog.mathomsolutions.com) about it during the next few weeks (good and bad) as we get it installed and I can kick the tires a bit.
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I have updated my blog at http://blog.mathomsolutions.com on this application and will be adding more over the next few days. We just finished installing it and I just returned home. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Thanks
SJ
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We use Polyserve, as well, and have been since October/November of last year. We had quite a few hiccup's in the first few months but lately it has been much more stable.
It has saved our company a lot of money and has prevented the sql server sprawl which had become a major problem here.
HH
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HGhumphrey,
could you send me a private message (just click on my name to the left and that will bring up my profile and there should be a link to send a private message), I would be interested in hearing more about your experiences.
Thanks
SJ
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I'd like to hear more about the hiccups, too. We are eyeing Polyserve as a replacement for Microsoft Clustering Services. We have no problem with sprawl, it's a pure HA manuever. Because we are not combating sprawl, it's not a money-saver for us unless it increases uptime from snags we've hit from MSCS failover failures.
If there are reliability issues, I'd like to know.
-Eddie
Eddie Wuerch
MCM: SQL -
I've also requested a PM for more information about the hiccups. So far in testing it has looked promising.
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If anyone has any experience with Polyserver please, please, please post your comment where everyone can see them. This would include positive and negative experiences. Going back and forth in private messages negates the purpose of this board. Thank you.
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As I've stated in the PM questions that were sent to me, most of the hiccups were in the early stages of installing Polyserve. When I was in Beaverton for training, I had a guy in my class from another company that had recently installed Polyserve, and they had issues upfront as well. That's the name of the game with something that has a learning curve, which Polyserve does.
In the early stages, we had problems due to configuration confusion with running 64 bit OS and 32 bit SQL (we had never run 64 bit before), and we had issues with the SAN configuration. We had issues with expecting the failover time in Polyserve to be "a few seconds" every time but we had some big databases with BLOB fields that took longer to failover and the server to checkpoint which caused suspect databases because we would try the failover again thinking it had "frozen" (if we had left it alone and let it failover as it was doing, we would have been fine and subsequently that is what we have done). We had a few times where the only fix was a patch from polyserve.
Nothing was major and everything was rectified but it did take some patience on our end and on the application owner's in our company because we had some unexpected outages. Nothing was major we were always able to bring it back online immediately, but hiccup's will occur. As with everything else, it's not perfect.
We have now been running for over 6 months and the only issues we have now are a poorly configured SAN, which we can't do anything about in the near future.
HH
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Sounds good!
I think we're in luck not having BLOB used much so should be better off from that angle.
Thanks very much for sharing the info. I'll keep you guys updated as our rollout progresses.
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Interesting thread and I'd love to get a writeup from any of you to share with everyone on how the rollout goes (or has gone for any of you) and why you are using Polyserve.
They demo'd it for the SQLSErverCentral.com crew years ago and it looked very cool. However hardware was an issue for us here and it wasn't really something we could test, though I would have liked to.
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Steve,
I am doing just that on my blog http://blog.mathomsolutions.com/ The first post was about our current system and the goals we want to achieve and why. I am about ready to post the second entry (should be tomorrow) about the first days of the install and a few preinstallation subjects.
We bought it for several reasons but mostly for failover and for very basic load balancing. We haven't put it into production yet (June 2 is our deadline) but in the meantime, I am doing a ton of performance testing and failover scenarios which I will be writing about.
SJ
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