Friday, September 16, 2005

How to FUD Fast

Today was spent with lots of frustration on creating a Fusion Upgrade Definition (FUD), which is basically a file that transfers all definitions from one ITSM system to another without changing crucial data elements like Incident Records. The type I was trying to create was a comparison file. A brilliant feature really, it looks at an existing production database and compares it to another database and will present you with an list off all the differing objects that you can then store in a file.

The issue with the system is in the processing and more importantly memory required to run this operation. The AdminLoader.exe (basically the administration module) will consume up to 700Mb of RAM during the process. If it has to start running into Virtual memory during the process the whole system will grind to a halt. Typically I do development on a VMWare session with 512Mb ram (holding both the application server and the SQL database server) however this configuration will require over 12 hours to finish the process.

To get the comparison process down to under an hour I moved the SQL Databases onto a separate physical box, ran a VMware session of 512Mb for the Application Server (and licensing server) and finally ran the Administration Console on another machine with 1Gb of RAM. The process was still slow and the box is pretty much useless for anything until the comparision is completed.

I've also been told that it will still take over 20 Mins when the Application Server (running the Administration Console) is a Dual Xeon with 4Gb Ram and the SQL Server is of similar spec.

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