[Labs-l] Ability of Labs to be the new WMDE Toolserver by 2014

[Ryan Lane]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 6:02 AM, DeltaQuad Wikipedia
<deltaquadwiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have some general questions for Labs Administrators as WMDE is looking for
> Labs to be a relatively good environment for current Toolserver users by
> 2014. (See "[Toolserver-l] Future of the toolserver" [1 - Full thread] [2 -
> Message of this post] and WMDE Draft budget [3])
>
> 1) Is there any plan right now to do database replication of WMF wiki
> servers or at the very least an equivalent? (Currently a problem for many
> and personally on one of my MMPs @ Toolserver)

Yes. It should be available within the next 3-4 months. It could be
sooner, but 3-4 months is the current goal deadline.

> 2) Is Labs (myself not knowing what supports it) going to be able to handle
> all of the tools and users that Toolserver has currently if we *all*
> migrated?

Yes. The capacity of Labs is far greater than Toolserver's. We have a
cluster in the pmtpa and eqiad datacenters. Each cluster has 7 compute
nodes for virtual machines, 2 database servers for replicas, 1
database server for user databases and 4 storage nodes for shared
storage access.

In total that's:

* 14 compute nodes with a total of 2.5TB of RAM, 224 CPU cores, and
14TB of storage for virtual machine images
* 4 databases for replicas with a total of 740GB of RAM and 64 CPU cores
* 8 storage nodes with a total of 128TB of storage

> 3) Is there a guide for both non-registered users to get registered and a
> guide for people who have registered but have no clue what they are doing or
> how to operate anything? (Myself being in the latter group)

Soon registration will be open to the general public, so there's not
much of a need for a guide for that.

Otherwise, we have documentation for a number of tasks, but overall
the docs aren't great. The thing that makes this difficult is that
what you can do in Labs is so open ended. We've just now started
adding features for Toolserver users, so hopefully by the time we've
added all of the necessary features we'll have reasonable docs.

> 4) Is there anything we should know about that could inhibit this transfer
> besides question #1?
>

Manpower. Labs is just providing the infrastructure. We can't migrate
the tools. In fact, like Toolserver, we're expecting the community to
build most of the environment, since they'll likely do a better job of
it.

Since you're an experienced Toolserver user, we'd love to have your
help with this.

- Ryan