Minimum sever requirements?

[Daniel McCarty <da...@whleary.com>]

Apologies in advance if this was asked before, but I’ve looked at guacamole.apache.org and the usual places and haven’t seen a definitive answer.

We have a small Guacamole installation that forwards our sales and field service teams to a handful of Windows demo servers via RDP.  The main guac server was running in AWS as a t3a.micro.  (which is an AMD EPYC 7000 @ 2.5GHz, 2-core, 1GB RAM machine.)  After uptime of about 2 weeks we would start seeing datadog alerts about the service crashing and restarting, and about every 4 weeks the server itself would hang and need to be restarted.  This happened for a few months.  We checked syslog, localhost_access, and the usual suspects, and eventually narrowed the issue down to the system running at about 90% available memory.  We replaced the instance with a t3a.small (with 2X the memory).

Since then the new machine has been up for about 8 straight weeks without a hiccup, which is good news.  But before we mark this completely resolved, I just wanted to double check that we’ve gone about this the right way and the earlier machine was just too small?

Thanks in advance,
Dan



Daniel McCarty
Director of Engineering
W. H. Leary Company
8440 183rd Place Tinley Park, IL 60487 USA
P. +1 708.444.4900
w. whleary.com<http://www.whleary.com>
[cid:image078213.PNG@41c0f1ca.4c987d72]<https://www.whleary.com/maq-gluing-detection-controller>

Re: [External] Minimum sever requirements?

[Nick Couchman <vn...@apache.org>]

On Mon, Jan 3, 2022 at 3:41 PM Daniel McCarty <da...@whleary.com> wrote:

> Interesting, and thanks for the note about t4g’s.  Our user requirements
> are quite small, less than a dozen overall and probably not more than 3
> concurrently, at least for now.
>
>
>

Yeah, I should have mentioned those are the numbers for 25 _concurrent_
users - so I would say your t3a.small ought to be sufficient for your
workload.


> I suspect I know the answer, but just to hear it directly from the source,
> I take it ARM is a first class citizen when it comes to Guac releases?
>
>
>

I would say that most of the development is done on Intel-based processors,
and we don't have ARM-based Docker images, yet, but there's nothing in the
code that is specific to Intel or that has to be developed specifically for
ARM. For Guacamole Client, Java and Tomcat both run perfectly fine on ARM,
and the Guacamole Client code deploys fine there. For guacd, you just need
the development packages for the ARM platform.

I've personally deployed Guacamole onto t4g instances running Amazon Linux
2 with no issues.

-Nick

>

RE: [External] Minimum sever requirements?

[Daniel McCarty <da...@whleary.com>]

Interesting, and thanks for the note about t4g’s.  Our user requirements are quite small, less than a dozen overall and probably not more than 3 concurrently, at least for now.

I suspect I know the answer, but just to hear it directly from the source, I take it ARM is a first class citizen when it comes to Guac releases?

Thanks,
Dan




Daniel McCarty
Director of Engineering
W. H. Leary Co.
P. +1 708.444.4900
E. danielm@whleary.com | W. whleary.com<http://www.whleary.com>

From: Nick Couchman <vn...@apache.org>
Sent: Monday, January 3, 2022 12:25 PM
To: user@guacamole.apache.org
Subject: Re: [External] Minimum sever requirements?

On Mon, Jan 3, 2022 at 1:19 PM Daniel McCarty <da...@whleary.com>> wrote:
Apologies in advance if this was asked before, but I’ve looked at guacamole.apache.org<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__guacamole.apache.org&d=DwQFaQ&c=euGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=KfJK_i8bAAiKEOAyAm9y9vt5kSwc8dkKCDiCjPA9mhw&m=2RufjFoKfismicK1XIMOm0WJ8FDK3FdsUaTL6qxIulI&s=FBvCLjg8O9icKRQ54qS4L4KLBbHuy4kS0cEnCh7FVU8&e=> and the usual places and haven’t seen a definitive answer.

We have a small Guacamole installation that forwards our sales and field service teams to a handful of Windows demo servers via RDP.  The main guac server was running in AWS as a t3a.micro.  (which is an AMD EPYC 7000 @ 2.5GHz, 2-core, 1GB RAM machine.)  After uptime of about 2 weeks we would start seeing datadog alerts about the service crashing and restarting, and about every 4 weeks the server itself would hang and need to be restarted.  This happened for a few months.  We checked syslog, localhost_access, and the usual suspects, and eventually narrowed the issue down to the system running at about 90% available memory.  We replaced the instance with a t3a.small (with 2X the memory).

Since then the new machine has been up for about 8 straight weeks without a hiccup, which is good news.  But before we mark this completely resolved, I just wanted to double check that we’ve gone about this the right way and the earlier machine was just too small?


How many users do you have using the instance? If you're running both Guacamole Client (Tomcat) and guacd on the same system, then yes I'd suspect that the t3a.micro was a bit on the small side, and that bumping to the t3a.small is probably sufficient. You also might consider using the T4g class - there's nothing about Guacamole that requires Intel-based processors, and AWS's Gravitron (aarch64) processors run things just fine. The T4g instances are a little less expensive, too, so you'll save some money over time.

IIRC, Mike had come up with some general numbers that I can't exactly remember off the top of my head, but I think it was something along the lines of 1 CPU core and 4GB of RAM for every 25 users, dependent upon what kind of workload they're doing (won't work for 25 x YouTube watchers).

-Nick

Re: Minimum sever requirements?

[Nick Couchman <vn...@apache.org>]

On Mon, Jan 3, 2022 at 1:19 PM Daniel McCarty <da...@whleary.com> wrote:

> Apologies in advance if this was asked before, but I’ve looked at
> guacamole.apache.org and the usual places and haven’t seen a definitive
> answer.
>
>
>
> We have a small Guacamole installation that forwards our sales and field
> service teams to a handful of Windows demo servers via RDP.  The main guac
> server was running in AWS as a t3a.micro.  (which is an AMD EPYC 7000 @
> 2.5GHz, 2-core, 1GB RAM machine.)  After uptime of about 2 weeks we would
> start seeing datadog alerts about the service crashing and restarting, and
> about every 4 weeks the server itself would hang and need to be restarted.
> This happened for a few months.  We checked syslog, localhost_access, and
> the usual suspects, and eventually narrowed the issue down to the system
> running at about 90% available memory.  We replaced the instance with a
> t3a.small (with 2X the memory).
>
>
>
> Since then the new machine has been up for about 8 straight weeks without
> a hiccup, which is good news.  But before we mark this completely resolved,
> I just wanted to double check that we’ve gone about this the right way and
> the earlier machine was just too small?
>
>
>

How many users do you have using the instance? If you're running both
Guacamole Client (Tomcat) and guacd on the same system, then yes I'd
suspect that the t3a.micro was a bit on the small side, and that bumping to
the t3a.small is probably sufficient. You also might consider using the T4g
class - there's nothing about Guacamole that requires Intel-based
processors, and AWS's Gravitron (aarch64) processors run things just fine.
The T4g instances are a little less expensive, too, so you'll save some
money over time.

IIRC, Mike had come up with some general numbers that I can't exactly
remember off the top of my head, but I think it was something along the
lines of 1 CPU core and 4GB of RAM for every 25 users, dependent upon what
kind of workload they're doing (won't work for 25 x YouTube watchers).

-Nick

>