blog'o thnet

Here is a little press review mostly around Oracle technologies and Solaris in particular, and a lot more:

How to Set Up a Load-Balanced Application Across Two Oracle Solaris Zones

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-dev/loadbalancedapp-1653020.html

This article describes how to combine the built-in Integrated Load Balancer (ILB) with Oracle Solaris Zones and the new network virtualization capabilities of Oracle Solaris 11 to set up a virtual server on a single system. This article starts with a brief overview of ILB and follows with an example of setting up a virtual Apache Tomcat server instance. You will need a basic knowledge of Oracle Solaris Zones and networking administration.

How to Use Oracle VM Templates

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-dev/configure-vm-templates-1656261.html

This article describes how to prepare an Oracle VM environment to use Oracle VM Templates, how to obtain a template, and how to deploy the template to your Oracle VM environment. It also describes how to create a virtual machine based on that template and how you can clone the template and change the clone's configuration. As an example, the article uses a template for Oracle Database that contains two disk images: an Oracle Linux system image and an Oracle Database image.

NUM_PARALLEL_LPS for AIX and for PowerHA

• http://www.wmduszyk.com/?p=8556

This logical volume has stale partitions, so sync it. Doing 4 stale partitions at a time seems to be a win most of the time. However, we will honor the NUM_PARALLEL_LPS value in /etc/environment, if set.

DTrace in the zone

• http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2012/06/07/dtrace-in-the-zone/

So with these three changes, I am relieved to report that DTrace is now completely usable in the non-global zone — and all without sacrificing the security model of zones! If you are a Joyent cloud customer, we will be rolling out a platform with this modification across the cloud (it necessitates a reboot, so don’t expect it before your next scheduled maintenance window); if you are a SmartOS user, look for this in our next SmartOS release; and if you are using another illumos-based distro (e.g., OpenIndiana or OmniOS) look for it in an upcoming release — we will be integrating these changes into illumos, so you can expect them to be in downstream distros soon. And here’s to DTrace in the zone!

What happened to the MAUs on T4?

• https://blogs.oracle.com/jsavit/entry/no_mau_required_on_a

Besides being much faster than its predecessors, the T4 also integrates hardware crypto acceleration so its seamlessly available to applications, whether domains are being used or not. Administrators no longer have to control how they are allocated - it is available to all CPUs and virtual environments without any administrative effort.

FOSS Support In Oracle Solaris

• https://blogs.oracle.com/solarisfoss/entry/foss_support_in_oracle_solaris

Support of Free and Open Source Software in Oracle Solaris is described inside a knowledge article [ID 1400676.1], which can be found inside My Oracle Support (MOS). This knowledge article is the most definitive source of information concerning FOSS support in Oracle Solaris and shall be used by Oracle Solaris customers.

Virtualise Storage with Style: Shared Storage Pools

• https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/AIXDownUnder/entry/virtualise_with_style_powervm_webinars20

The team from IBM's Advanced Technology Support, Europe have done it again! Their free Webinar Series on Power Systems Virtualisation from IBM has another contribution from Nigel Griffiths, (a.k.a. Mr NMon). This presentation is on Shared Storage Pools from Experience - a kind of walk through of where the rubber hits the road. On the PowerVM Virtualisation Webinar Series Wiki, scroll down to Session 13: Shared Storage Pools ... from Experience.

Best Practices - Core allocation

• https://blogs.oracle.com/jsavit/entry/best_practices_core_allocation

SPARC T-series servers currently have up to 4 CPU sockets, each of which has up to 8 or (on SPARC T3) 16 CPU cores, while each CPU core has 8 threads, for a maximum of 512 dispatchable CPUs. The defining feature of Oracle VM Server for SPARC is that each domain is assigned CPU threads or cores for its exclusive use. This avoids the overhead of software-based time-slicing and emulation (or binary rewriting) of system state-changing privileged instructions used in traditional hypervisors.

Oracle Solaris Zones Physical to virtual (P2V)

• https://blogs.oracle.com/vreality/entry/oracle_solaris_zones_physical_to

This document describes the process of creating and installing a Solaris 10 image build from physical system and migrate it into a virtualized operating system environment using the Oracle Solaris 10 Zones Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) capability.

Networking in VirtualBox

• https://blogs.oracle.com/fatbloke/entry/networking_in_virtualbox1

Networking in VirtualBox is extremely powerful, but can also be a bit daunting, so here's a quick overview of the different ways you can setup networking in VirtualBox, with a few pointers as to which configurations should be used and when.

Vendors, Systems, Processors, and Vendors Update

• http://netmgt.blogspot.fr/2012/06/vendors-systems-processors-and-vendors.html

Hot Chips 24: A Symposium on High Performance Chips is right around the corner, and the agenda looks pretty exciting.

Upgrading a very, very, very old VIOS

• https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/AIXDownUnder/entry/upgrading_a_very_very_very_old_vios

This is the epic of the upgrade for the Virtual I/O server (VIOS) from version 1.4 to version 2.2.

Fragmentation de l'Intimate Shared Memnory (ISM)

• http://www.gloumps.org/article-fragmentation-de-l-intimate-shared-memory-ism-106867569.html

Petit compte rendu sur un problème de performance que je viens de rencontrer sur un serveur Solaris Sparc avec une base de donnée Oracle. Le contexte étant le suivant : temps de réponse dégradés suite au reboot du serveur. Bien entendu, aucun changement entre les deux reboot et pourtant l'application fonctionne moins bien qu'avant.

Workload Partition (WPAR) - Answers

• https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/aixpert/entry/workload_partition_wpar_answers305

This week I spent 4 hours with a customer covering many advanced WPAR topics and took way a bunch of questions that I had to check the answers and ask the WPAR developers themselves to be sure I had the right answers. If the questions were not clear to my customers and I did know initially know the answers then there may be others with similar issues so I thought I would share the answers with everyone.

Workload Partition (WPAR) - Sharing filesystem Global AIX to WPAR

• https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/aixpert/entry/workload_partition_wpar_sharing_filesystem_global_aix_to_wpar73

From the Global AIX, I can add a filesystem to /wpars/WPARname/directory so the WPAR has access but what if I don't want to have the filesystem mounted there in the Global AIX?

POWER System Firmware Warnings & Red Lights on the Dashboard

• https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/aixpert/entry/power_system_firmware_warnings_red_lights_on_the_dashboard10

Earlier today I received email from a customer reporting their large POWER7 based machines where on firmware 720_64 to 720_90 and their reluctance to take the outage to upgrade it. They were asking for fine details of newer firmware levels and what advantages this would bring to "justify the outage to their user departments".

Breaking the telnet addiction with netcat

• http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/2012/06/26/breaking-the-telnet-addiction-with-netcat/

After many years of use it’s become almost second nature to type ‘telnet ’ when I need to see if a system has TCP port open. Newer systems no longer install telnet by default.

To extreme micro-partition or to Workload-Parttion, that is the question?

• https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/aixpert/entry/to_extreme_micro_partition_or_to_workload_parttion_that_is_the_question137

So I got asked, just as an example configuration which forces lots of workload per CPU:
Given a 16 CPU POWER machine and a need to run 100 workloads, would I recommend 100 LPARs or 100 WPARs?

Oracle VM Server for SPARC on YouTube

• http://www.youtube.com/user/OVMSPARC

What's up with LDoms: Part 1 - Introduction & Basic Concepts

• https://blogs.oracle.com/cmt/en/entry/what_s_up_with_ldoms

LDoms - the correct name is Oracle VM Server for SPARC - have been around for quite a while now. But to my surprise, I get more and more requests to explain how they work or to give advise on how to make good use of them. This made me think that writing up a few articles discussing the different features would be a good idea.

What's up with LDoms: Part 2 - Creating a first, simple guest

• https://blogs.oracle.com/cmt/en/entry/what_s_up_with_ldoms1

In the first part, we discussed the basic concepts of LDoms and how to configure a simple control domain. We saw how resources were put aside for guest systems and what infrastructure we need for them. With that, we are now ready to create a first, very simple guest domain. In this first example, we'll keep things very simple. Later on, we'll have a detailed look at things like sizing, IO redundancy, other types of IO as well as security.

Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure

• http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1AVRXJL&ct=120612

Oracle VM moves into Challenger Position in Gartner x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure Magic Quadrant Report.

Présentation Automated Installer, TechDay Solaris 11, Guses, par Bruno Philippe

• http://www.gloumps.org/photo-2085386-001_jpg.html

Here is a little press review around Oracle technologies, and Solaris in particular:

IOPS and latency are not related - HDD performance explored

• http://blog.richardelling.com/2012/03/iops-and-latency-are-not-related-hdd.html

Today, we routinely hear people carrying on about IOPS-this and IOPS-that. Mostly this seems to come from marketing people: 1.5 million IOPS-this, billion IOPS-that. Right off the bat, a billion IOPS is not hard to do, the metric lends itself rather well to parallelization...

How to Use the Power Management Controls on SPARC Servers

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-dev/pwr-mgmt-sparc-cmt-1563618.html

SPARC T-Series systems have power-saving features designed into the hardware and software. These features allow you to reduce server power consumption, which leads to a cost reduction for environmental cooling and reduced power usage by other infrastructure components. The SPARC T-Series power management (PM) interfaces make it easy to manage these PM features.

Solaris: What comes next?

• https://blogs.oracle.com/alanc/entry/solaris_what_comes_next

As you probably know by now, a few months ago, we released Solaris 11 after years of development. That of course means we now need to figure out what comes next - if Solaris 11 is “The First Cloud OS”, then what do we need to make future releases of Solaris be, to be modern and competitive when they're released? So we've been having planning and brainstorming meetings, and I've captured some notes here from just one of those we held a couple weeks ago with a number of the Silicon Valley based engineers.

Solaris 11 features: nscfg

• http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/7452-Solaris-11-features-nscfg.html

As you may have noticed many configuration tasks around name services have moved into the SMF in Solaris 11. However you don't have to use the svccfg command in order to configure them, you could still use the old files. However you can't just edit them, you have to import the data into the SMF repository. There are many reasons for this need but the ultimate one is in the start method. I will explain that later. In this article i want to explain, how nscfg can help you with with the naming service configuration of your system.

New Oracle VM Hardware Certifications

• https://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/entry/new_oracle_vm_hardware_certifications

We've received inquiries from the community on certification of Oracle VM 3.0 on HP Proliant systems. We're pleased to update that we've recently completed certification of the HP Proliant systems for Oracle VM 3.0.

Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster is now Supported by SAP

• http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/sap/infrastructure/sparc-supercluster-for-sap-1559291.pdf

Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster now runs the Oracle Database, the SAP central instance, application or web server, and Oracle Enterprise Manager management software along with all your SAP applications.

POWER, AMD, Itanium, and SPARC

• http://netmgt.blogspot.fr/2012/04/power-amd-itanium-and-sparc.html

The addition of compression engines (in the T5), in addition to the well-know crypto engines in the SPARC T Series will be a welcome capability addition for general purpose computing. Fewer proprietary crypto cards, proprietary network devices with crypto engines, and proprietary disk arrays (sporting compression, encryption, and dedup) will be needed - to achieve outstanding performance of general purpose applications running under SPARC.

How the SPARC T4 Processor Optimizes Throughput Capacity: A Case Study

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-dev/t-series-latency-1579242.pdf

Latency is the time delay between when a request is sent and the moment the result of the request is delivered. Such delays can be found between many components within a computer system and can have a significant impact on performance.

In this paper, the focus is on instruction-level latencies, which are usually expressed in processor cycles. Many instructions have a fixed latency, but there are also instructions with a latency that depends on the runtime conditions or data type format.

AIX to Oracle Solaris 11 Evaluation

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/overview/aix-mapping-guide-1566108.html

The following guide gives an overview of some of the technologies included in Oracle Solaris 11 and the direct benefit you can get by using some of these features. This guide also provides a similar technology mapping, where possible, between IBM AIX and Oracle Solaris 11, so that administrators with knowledge in the former can kick start their learning experience if planning deploy the latter.

dtrace.conf(12) wrap-up

• http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2012/04/09/dtrace-conf12-wrap-up/

For the second time in as many quadrennial dtrace.confs, I was impressed at how well the unconference format worked out. Sharing coffee with the DTrace community, it was great to see some of the oldest friends of DTrace — Jarod Jenson, Stephen O’Grady, Jonathan Adams to name a few — and to put faces to names — Scott Fritchie, Dustin Sallings, Blake Irvin, etc — of the many new additions to the DTrace community. You can see all the slides and videos; these are my thoughts and notes on the day.

Ksplice: Kernal Update Without Reboot

• http://netmgt.blogspot.fr/2012/04/ksplice-kernal-update-without-reboot.html

Operating Systems normally comprise two distinct layers: the kernel and the user space. Normally, updating the kernel would require a reboot, so the OS can apply a new kernel module. Operating Systems like Solaris created a mechanism called "live update" to update OS Kernel, OS User Space, or even third-party applications (not to mention provide rollback) with merely a reboot. Oracle Solaris 11 facilitates virtually unlimited patch/rollback cycles leveraging ZFS. The new Ksplice tool from Oracle allows for Linux to get closer to Solaris uptime requirements by providing for kernel updates without reboot, leaving OS User Space and Applications to normal reboot or application restart cycles.

How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project

• http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2012/04/how-avoid-your-next-12-month-science-project

Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company.

How to Update Oracle Solaris 11 Systems Using Support Repository Updates

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-admin/o11-018-howto-update-s11-1572261.html

Oracle Solaris 11 includes a new package management system that greatly simplifies the process of managing system software helping to reduce the risk of operating system maintenance, including planned and unplanned system downtime. Image Packaging System (IPS) takes much of the complexity out of software administration with its ability to automatically calculate dependencies, and it merges both the package and patch management into a single administrative interface.

This article steps through updating an Oracle Solaris 11 system with software packages that are provided with an active Oracle support agreement. In the process, it covers some of the basics that you should know to ensure an update goes successfully and safely.

IBM Launches Hybrid, Flexible Systems Into The Data Center

• http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh041612-story01.html

It takes a little time and a lot of money to roll out a new server architecture, and even a company as large as IBM can't do it very often. The System/360 in 1964. The System/38 in 1979 and its follow-on, the AS/400, in 1988. The RS/6000 in 1990. The BladeCenter in 2002, and the Sequent-inspired clustered server nodes in the xSeries and pSeries in the mid-2000s. iDataplex in 2008. And now the PureSystem converged infrastructure launched last week, in 2012.

OmniOS builds on Illumos to make a complete operating system

• http://omnios.omniti.com/

"OmniOS is our vision of what OpenSolaris could have been had it remained in the open. It runs better, faster and has more innovations," continued Schlossnagle. "OmniTI did not want to lose the benefits that OpenSolaris technologies brought to customers, so we decided to pursue the continuation of the OS on our own. [...]"

Latency and I/O Size: Cars vs Trains

• http://blog.richardelling.com/2012/04/latency-and-io-size-cars-vs-trains.html

A legacy view of system performance is that bigger I/O is better than smaller I/O. This has led many to worry about things like "jumbo" frames for Ethernet or setting the maximum I/O size for SANs. Is this worry justified? Let's take a look...

PureSystems Giving You Job Jitters? The Doctor is In!

• https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/AIXDownUnder/entry/puresystems_job_jitters_the_doctor_is_in25

Will these IBM PureSystems put me out of a job?

After all, you've had a successful career configuring systems, tuning them, rebuilding them, finding performance bottlenecks, writing scripts, and juggling high user expectations with a budget that would starve a mouse. Now there are these new systems that are configured in the blink of an eye, tune themselves and (you may be thinking), don't need you.

Well, before you sign the extinction certificate and set up the world's first museum for experienced AIX sys admins, have a think about the number of reasons your career is not doomed as of 11 April 2012, the day the new IBM PureSystems were launched.

How I Decide Which Virtualization Technology to Use

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-dev/which-virt-1592222.html

When the time comes to update your hardware, some workloads that were comfortably ensconced in their own hardware need to be consolidated onto systems with virtual environments. But how do you choose between the various methods of virtualization? For instance, Oracle Solaris lets you create a virtual network. And virtual storage. You can allocate memory and CPUs to workloads in interesting ways. Oracle Solaris Zones (previously called Oracle Solaris Containers) lets you virtualize entire systems. You also have different hypervisors to choose from. And what about the hardware virtualization options in SPARC and x86 platforms -- how do they add to your options, and when should you use them?

Performability Analysis

• http://blog.richardelling.com/2012/04/performability-analysis.html

Modern systems are continuing to evolve and become more tolerant to failures. For many systems today, a simple performance or availability analysis does not reveal how well a system will operate when in a degraded mode. A performability analysis can help answer these questions for complex systems. In this blog, an updated version of an old blog post on performability, I'll show one of the methods we use for performability analysis.

How to Live Install from Oracle Solaris 10 to Oracle Solaris 11 11/11

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-admin/howto-solaris-live-install-1599365.html

First, you create a set of ZFS send archives—golden image—on an Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 system that is the same model as your Oracle Solaris 10 system. Then you install this golden image on an unused disk of the system running Oracle Solaris 10 to enable it to be rebooted into Oracle Solaris 11 11/11. The basic system configuration parameters from the Oracle Solaris 10 image are stored and applied to the Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 image.

Get Ready to Change your Job

• http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2012/04/get-ready-change-your-job

As new IT concepts like virtualization, Engineered Systems, Cloud Computing, DevOps, new services, patterns and languages emerge, they force IT organizations to re-think and adapt roles, responsibilities and jobs to the new reality. Change is a constant in IT, and the current times are likely to see a lot more change than we have seen before.

Enable DTrace hooks in GENERIC

• http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-src-all/2012-April/052347.html

This commit enables DTrace in FreeBSD-10 GENERIC kernel!

Here is a little press review around Oracle technologies, and Solaris in particular:

Are SSD-based arrays a bad idea?

• http://storagemojo.com/2012/03/05/are-ssd-based-arrays-a-bad-idea/

Think: if NAND flash storage arrays were being developed today, what is the chance that we’d put the flash into little bricks and then plug a bunch of them into a backplane? So why do it now?

Shall I use Zones or LDOMs?

• https://blogs.oracle.com/orasysat/entry/shall_i_use_zones_or

Of course one can't answer this question without talking about the platform requirements and the reasons to pick the right technologies, but before we'd go into details, let me get the most important statement straight: Zones and LDOMs are not rivalling, but complementary technologies. If you need kernelspace separation, use ldoms. But run your applications in zones within those ldoms anyway!

Zones? Clusters? Clustering zones? Zoneclusters?

• https://blogs.oracle.com/orasysat/entry/zones_clusters_clustering_zones_zoneclusters

Everyone values zones, Solaris' builtin OS-virtualization. They are near-footprintless. Their administration is delegable. They have their own bootenvironments. Easily cloneable with ZFS snapshots, etc. They are also cleanly integratable with Solaris Cluster in different ways - this post should shed some light on the different options, and provide an example of zoneclusters.

POWER: Loss of Sony Playstation Platform

• http://netmgt.blogspot.com/2012/03/power-loss-of-sony-playstation-platform.html

Apple abandoned PowerPC for Intel in 2006, leaving IBM POWER without a desktop partner. Sony is rumored to discontinue use of IBM POWER for their gaming consoles in the PlayStation 4, starting the decline of POWER in the gaming market. POWER7+ from IBM is now nearly a half-year late and IBM has still not delivered as of March 2012.

Cheatsheet for configuring...

• http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/7440-Cheatsheet-for-configuring-a-new-nodename-in-Solaris-11.html
• http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/7439-Cheatsheet-for-configuring-the-networking-in-Solaris-11.html

There are quite a number of changes in the procedures to configure some of the networking parameters. Many things have changed, that were just editing of a file in the past, have now command-line based tools in order to change their parameters. Before you ask: The reason for this steps are quite simple.

Solaris Fingerprint Database - How it's done in Solaris 11

• https://blogs.oracle.com/cmt/entry/solaris_fingerprint_database_how_it

Many remember the Solaris Fingerprint Database. It was a great tool to verify the integrity of a solaris binary. Unfortunately, it went away with the rest of sunsolve, and was not revived in the replacement, "My Oracle Support". Here's the good news: It's back for Solaris 11, and it's better than ever!

Sun ZFS Storage Appliance : can do blocks, can do files too!

• https://blogs.oracle.com/roch/entry/sun_zfs_storage_appliance_can

As a benchmark SPC-1's profile is close to what a fixed block size DB would actually be doing. See Fast Safe Cheap : Pick 3 for more details on that result. Here, for an encore, we're showing today how the ZFS Storage appliance can perform in a totally different environment : generic NFS file serving.

The USE Method...

• http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2012/02/29/the-use-method/
• http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2012/03/01/the-use-method-solaris-performance-checklist/
• http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2012/03/07/the-use-method-linux-performance-checklist/

A serious performance issue arises, and you suspect it’s caused by the server. What do you check first? Back when I was teaching operating system performance, I wanted a methodology my students could follow to find common issues quickly, without overlooking important areas. Like an emergency checklist in a flight manual, it would be something simple, straightforward, complete and fast. I eventually came up with the “USE” method (short for “Utilization Saturation and Errors”), which I’ve used many times successfully in enterprise environments, and more recently in cloud computing environments.

Getting Started with Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-admin/uek-rel2-getting-started-1555632.html

This article describes how you can update your Oracle Linux systems to the latest version of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. By switching to the latest Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, you can get the latest innovations in mainline Linux. Switching is easy—applications and the operating system remain unchanged. There is no need to perform a full re-install; only the relevant RPM packages are replaced. You can obtain future updates easily from the Unbreakable Linux Network to keep your systems fully patched and secured.

Oracle Solaris 11 Cheatsheet

• http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/7442-Oracle-Solaris-11-Cheatsheet.html

In the last few days i created a cheat sheet for Solaris 11 ... while it's still a work in progress (it will be surely longer in the future).

Performance impact of the new mtmalloc memory allocator

• http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/7443-Performance-impact-of-the-new-mtmalloc-memory-allocator.html

I didn't wrote about this as it was in my phase of silence but there was some change in the allocator area, Solaris 10 got a revamped mtmalloc allocator in version Solaris 10 08/11 (as described in "libmtmalloc Improvements"). The new memory allocator was introduced to Solaris development by the PSARC case 2010/212.

Linux Kernel Performance: Flame Graphs

• http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2012/03/17/linux-kernel-performance-flame-graphs/

To get the most out of your systems, you want detailed insight into what the operating system kernel is doing. A typical approach is to sample stack traces; however, the data collected can be time consuming to read or navigate. Flame Graphs are a new way to visualize sampled stack traces, and can be applied to the Linux kernel for some useful (and stunning!) visualizations.

'Cheap' Oracle box bashes NetApp benchmark

Save one MILLION dollars, get 32% more speed

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/15/oracle_zfs_spec_result/

The Sun ZFS 7320 scored 134,140 SPECsfs2008 IOPS with an overall response time of 1.51msecs and cost $179,602.

Oracle quotes a price of $1,215,290 for NetApp's FAS3270 which scored 101,183 IOPS with a 1.66msec response time.

The Oracle-NetApp pricing difference is huge and, on the face of it, paying $1,035,698 more for 32 per cent less performance is not an attractive idea for a basic NFS file-serving box.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Oracle Solaris 11 Evaluation

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/overview/redhat-mapping-guide-1555721.html

The following guide gives an overview of some of the technologies included in Oracle Solaris 11 and the direct benefit you can get by using some of these features. This guide also provides a similar technology mapping, where possible, between Red Hat Enteprise Linux and Oracle Solaris 11, so that administrators with knowledge in the former can kick start their learning experience if planning deploy the latter.

How To install Solaris 11 automated install server

• https://blogs.oracle.com/unixman/entry/how_to_install_solaris_11

This a quick blog entry designed to outline the commands that can aid in the process of setting up a Solaris 11 Automated Install server. More details and an overview of what's changed, are of course available at the Simplified Installation section of the Oracle Solaris 11 Spotlight pages.

Great Solaris 10 features paving the way to Solaris 11

• https://blogs.oracle.com/orasysat/entry/great_solaris_10_features

Again: the main message is: Go for Solaris 11 if you can. If you need to run Solaris 10, we recommend deploying the mentioned technologies, they can and will improve your daily system engineering business and prepare your platform for the move to Solaris 11.

How to Find Out What's in an Oracle Solaris Binary File

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-dev/o11-160-binary-1451031.html

How to determine the contents of Oracle Solaris binaries and what tools you can use to read, extract, and delete sections. Plus, the effect of compiler flags on binary file size and how to reduce the size of the executable.

SPARC: Life in the Fast Lane - 10 Months Later

• http://netmgt.blogspot.fr/2012/03/sparc-life-in-fast-lane-10-months-later.html

Both Oracle and Fujitsu are independently pursuing SPARC in disjoint, non-overlapping, markets. They are not the only vendors creating new production quality SPARC processors (as noted by the former #1 HPC system from China.) SPARC appears to have a long road ahead, being implemented by multiple vendors, and each implementation performing best in it's class.

Here is a little press review around Oracle technologies, and Solaris in particular:

How I Used CGroups to Manage System Resources In Oracle Linux 6

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-admin/resource-controllers-linux-1506602.html

Having worked with resource controls in Oracle Solaris, I was anxious to learn how to do the same thing in Oracle Linux 6 with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK). Resource management using control groups (cgroups) is just one of many new features in Oracle Linux 6. Cgroups give administrators fine-grained control over resource allocations, helping to make sure that applications get what they need to deliver consistent response times and adequate performance.

ZFS: Apple Enters Storage Arena

• http://netmgt.blogspot.com/2012/02/zfs-apple-enters-storage-arena.html

With the creation of ZFS, Apple MacOSX has finally made it into the realm of being a very viable platform for server applications. No longer will people need to use MacOSX as a client and buy a SPARC or Intel Solaris platform as a server to gain the benefits of ZFS. Common designers, video publishers, and media collectors can now just add the occasional multi-terabyte hard drive and just keep on building their data collection with limited concern for failure - it will all be protected with parity and old deletions can be easily rolled back.

Intimate Shared Memory (ISM) et Solaris x86

• http://www.gloumps.org/article-intimate-shared-memory-ism-et-solaris-x86-1er-partie-96734001.html
• http://www.gloumps.org/article-intimate-shared-memory-ism-et-solaris-x86-2eme-partie-98254778.html

Suite à une migration d'une base de données Oracle d'une architecture Solaris Sparc à une architecture Solaris x86, l'équipe DBA a décidé d'utiliser pleinement la mémoire disponible sur cette nouvelle infrastructure. Disposant d'un serveur avec 512 Go de mémoire, la SGA de la base Oracle a été positionnée à 290 Go (afin de diminuer les lectures physiques et d'éviter les locks R/W). L'augmentation de cette SGA a eu un bénéfice important sur les opérations de lectures (plus d'activité sur les disques SAN concernant les lectures) par contre le système Solaris saturait...

Standard Locations (why?)

• http://blogs.oracle.com/SolarisSMF/entry/standard_locations_why

The manifest-import service manages importing of manifests that are delivered as part of a package for an application. This instantiates the service and its instances on the system. The manifest-import service will then manage re-importing those manifests if they are modified/upgraded in some way.

Changes to svccfg import and delete

• http://blogs.oracle.com/SolarisSMF/entry/changes_to_svccfg_import_and

The behavior of svccfg import and svccfg delete fmri has changed in S11 if the manifests are in SMF's standard locations.

Oracle’s SPARC T4 Server Momentum Expands Demand for SPARC Systems

• https://emeapressoffice.oracle.com/Press-Releases/Oracle-s-SPARC-T4-Server-Momentum-Expands-Demand-for-SPARC-Systems-2806.aspx

SPARC T4 Servers Adopted By Customers Across All Industries, Regions

Oracle Beats NetApp and EMC in Storage Magazine Quality Awards for NAS

• http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1505421

Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliances Earn Highest Ratings for Enterprise and Midrange NAS Systems

Solaris and SPARC virtualization management features of Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center including "Live Migration"

• http://blogs.oracle.com/oem/entry/virtualization_features_of_oem_ops

Virtualization is not a new concept; however, there have been numerous advances in recent years that are helping businesses to be more effective at managing their virtualized environments. The easier it is to manage assets reliably, with reduced risk of downtime, the better the ability to focus on optimizing asset utilization in balance with required Service Level Objectives.

Fujian Mobile Replacing its Existing Teradata System with Oracle Exadata

• http://blogs.oracle.com/databaseinsider/entry/fujian_mobile_replacing_its_existing

China Mobile (Fujian) (Fujian Mobile) is a rapidly expanding subsidiary of China Mobile (HK) Group. Fujian Mobile’s customer base has expanded rapidly with subscribers growing from 2 million to more than 22 million in the past few years. To meet this increasing demand, Fujian Mobile is replacing its current Teradata system with a full-rack Oracle Exadata system for its next-generation high performance BASS.

SPARC: Road Map Updated!

• http://netmgt.blogspot.com/2012/02/sparc-road-map-updated.html

The SPARC Road Map has been experiencing updates at a tremendous pace over the past few years, with new SPARC releases either happening early, with higher performance, or with a combination of the two. It is quite exciting to see SPARC back in the processor game again!

Less known Solaris 11 features: Shadow Migration

• http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/7432-Less-known-Solaris-11-features-Shadow-Migration.html

In the ZFS Storage Appliance we have little nice feature enabling you to do migrations of data in the background. It's called Shadow Migration. It's a really useful feature. Imagine you have a RAIDZ. After a time you recognize that RAIDZ wasn't a good decision for your workload and RAID10 would be much better choice. But how to transform it into a RAID10 and how to do it with minimal interruption? You can do this with the Shadow Migration feature. With the Shadow Migration feature, you can migrate the data from one local or remote filesystem to another, while you are already accessing the new one to get the data on the old ZFS filesystem. This feature is available in Solaris 11 as well.

Installing ZFS on a CentOS 6 Linux server

• http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/2012/02/13/installing-zfs-on-a-centos-6-linux-server/

As most of my long term readers know I am a huge Solaris fan. How can’t you love an Operating System that comes with ZFS, DTrace, Zones, FMA and Network Virtualization amongst other things? I use Linux during my day job, and I’ve been hoping for quite some time that Oracle would port one or more of these technologies to Linux. Well the first salvo has been fired, though it wasn’t from Oracle. It comes by way of the ZFS on Linux project, which is an in-kernel implementation of ZFS (this project is different from the FUSE ZFS port).

Increasing Application Availability by Using the Oracle VM Server for SPARC Live Migration Feature: An Oracle Database Example

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/vm/ovm-sparc-livemigration-1522412.pdf

One of the most significant business challenges is to create and preserve value in a highly competitive environment, while keeping business applications available and reducing costs. It is important to maximize the business application availability during planned or unplanned outages. This document provides information about increasing application availability by using the Oracle VM Server for SPARC software (previously called Sun Logical Domains).

By using an example and presenting various scenarios, this paper describes how to take advantage of the Live Migration capability in the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.1 software to increase the availability of an Oracle Database 11g Release 2 single-instance database.

Oracle Security Evaluations

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/security-evaluations-099357.html

Oracle Security Evaluations are an integral part of the Oracle Software Security Assurance program. Go to Security Evaluations for more information on the evaluations and validations that Oracle undertake.

CIFS Sharing on Solaris 11

• https://blogs.oracle.com/paulie/entry/cifs_sharing_on_solaris_11

Things have changed since Solaris 10 (and Solaris 11 Express too!) on how to properly set up a CIFS server on your Solaris 11 machine so that Windows clients can access files. There's some documentation on the changes here, but let me share the full instructions from beginning to end.

The Difference Between a Standard and a Preferred Vendor

• http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2012/02/difference-between-standard-and-preferred-vendor

Recently, I attended a customer workshop where the customer declared that they standardized on x86, VMware and Linux.

That got me and my colleague thinking about what standardization really means and whether that actually makes sense.

The workshop was actually about defining a PaaS platform for the customer, and early in the process they just said: Fine, but it's gonna be x86, VMware and Linux, because that's our standard. WTF?

Three Enterprise Architecture Principles for Building Clouds

• http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2012/02/three-enterprise-architecture-principles-building-clouds

One of the first things TOGAF recommends architects do when establishing an Enterprise Architecture practice within a company is to formulate Architecture Principles that guide the development of solutions. During the last few workshops and during some discussions with other architects, three principles in particular struck me as being key to successfully developing a Cloud solution.

Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3 has now been packaged for IPS

• http://pkg-register.oracle.com/

Go to http://pkg-register.oracle.com/ for details of adding your cert, key and publisher info!