[Spacewalk-list] New spackewalk deployment

[Paul Robert Marino]

well first of all the spacewalk mailing list doesn't set the replyto
field in the emails it relays for some reason so you can do a reply
all.

Using Oracle is fine if you have good DBA's just be aware you may need
to do some additional testing whenever you upgrade.
be warned form what I've heard its not as fast running on Oracle as it
is on PostgreSQL.
Also once your DBA's get use to PostgreSQL I think you will find that
they will like it. There are many things it can do better than Oracle
and its much more forgiving about things that are connon a sand trap
on Oracle. finally syntax wise the two are fairly similar in fact Ive
been told by a few Oracle DBA's after the first time they played with
it that its very much like a cross between a late 90's version of
oracle and DB2.

That said here are a few articles to start with if you decide to use PostgreSQL
# postgresql replication
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/high-availability.html
# PostgreSQL load balancing proxy and automated recovery system
http://www.pgpool.net/docs/latest/pgpool-en.html
# postgresql and spacewalk tuning
https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/PostgreSQLServerSetup

I do have a couple of additional notes
1) you may use a newer version of the postgresql server than the
postgresql client on the spacewalk server however you will need to
update the jdbc driver to match the version on the database server
2) I don't agree with one suggestion the article on fedorahosted.org
about spacewalk and PostgreSQL. tuning the server to 600 concurrent
connections is too high and may cause performance issues because it
will constrict the amount of ram each connection may use too severely.

As for VM's you can do it I just don't advise it. PostgreSQL can be
very rough on a system as far as ram and disk IO.
that said you can always start with VM's and migrate the database if
you find you are having performance issues. Its especially easy if you
use replication with pgpool.






On Sun, Sep 7, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Jagga Soorma <jagga13 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Paul,
>
> My apologies for sending this directly to you but could not find a way
> to respond to a specific message on the spacewalk mailing list.  A
> newbie here :)  First of all Thanks a lot for your response.  It looks
> like I should be using postgres db as the backend for the spacewalk
> environment since like you mentioned that is where the community
> support is headed.  Unfortunately we don't have any DBA expertise in
> our company when it comes to Postgres, however we have good DBA
> support for Oracle.  This is the reason why I would like to keep
> things simple for postgres and just try to do things myself.  If I use
> spacewalk for exposing channels only and not for building servers or
> managing configurations (pushes to client) on clients would it be okay
> if I just use the in built postgres db or should it still be using a
> external one?
>
> Do you know of any good documentation that goes over how to setup a
> external postgres db environment specifically for spacewalk?  I am not
> a DBA but setting up a postgres db should not be that complicated, I
> think.  Also, could that postgres db environment also be sitting on a
> virtual machine or would it be better on physical hardware?  I have a
> vmware vsphere 5.5 environment so can grant a lot of resources to the
> db vm.  However, we do use nfs as our backend datastores so disk i/o
> might potentially be a concern here, not sure.
>
> Thanks again for your help with this.