Documenting the harness
Today I spent some time documenting the performance harness I’m building. Not that exciting – I’m really more interested in building tests and experimenting with automation and such, but it’s a necessary evil. So far I’ve found the following places that I have to document:
- Apcon ports and connections
- Dell switch ports
- F5 BIG-IP ports and cabling
- All versions of software/firmware
So far, the majority of this documentation is within the systems themselves. For Apcon, this was a little difficult to find in the web UI, but once there, it took a few minutes to input all of the port names.
The Dell switch is a known quantity as we’ve used these many times before for other projects. That doesn’t make it any easier, as the syntax is slightly off from any of the others out there. For instance, port names are unnecessarily long, and there are extraneous words you have to use to switch to a specific ethernet interface. They’ve also chosen some really weird abbreviations for the 10GB ports – x – which is really hard to remember. Regardless of their unique config, they are very good performing switches. There was a Tolly evaluation of the Dell PowerConnect 6248 a while ago that really pushed us towards using these for many projects since they are so well performing, and for not a lot of money.
I’ve also started creating a high level network diagram which I hope to post here shortly to show how everything is connected. Of course, the hope is that the Apcon and Test Conductor will allow me to make this a constantly changing network setup based on the various topology goals I have in mind, so the diagram will just be a starting point.
Finally, I’ve created a single link to see all the articles on the harness, which can be found here. More info tomorrow…