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Tuesday 30 April 2013

Press Review #22

By Julien Gabel on Tuesday 30 April 2013, 18:11 - Solaris

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

Permissive and Restricted Policies

Recently I posted two entries about the new Extended Policy functionality in Oracle Solaris 11.1. One demonstrated how to create application sandboxes, and the other how to confine services, like MySQL. Both of these are examples of restrictive policies, whereas privileges have traditionally been used to implement permissive policies, hence the term privilege escalation. The basic functionality and terminology first appeared in Trusted Solaris in 1991. Unfortunately, a draft of the POSIX 1.e Security Specification (withdrawn), used the term capabilities for this functionality, which was subsequently used by Linux developers. Oracle Solaris privileges do share some common terminology with Linux, including the permitted, effective, and inheritable privilege sets. But almost everything else is different.

Midrange Power7+ Servers: The More Oomph You Want, The More It Costs

In last week's issue of The Four Hundred, I walked you though the pricing for various sized configurations of the new Power 750+ and Power 760+ midrange servers using IBM's dual-chip module (DCM) variant of the Power7+ processor. That just looked at the system hardware costs. This week, as I have done in the past, I want to walk you through how the raw computing, operating system, and Software Maintenance costs compare across each processor SKU and how those costs stack up with prior Power 750 machines.

Ksplice Inspector

With so many kernel updates released, it can be difficult to keep track. At Oracle, we monitor kernels on a daily basis and provide bug and security updates administrators can apply without a system reboot. To help out, the Ksplice team at Oracle has produced the Ksplice Inspector, a web tool to show you the updates Ksplice can apply to your kernel with zero downtime.

Oracle Solaris and SPARC Performance, Part 1

To start with: we've just released an update to Oracle Solaris Studio, with compiler optimizations specifically designed to get the most performance out of applications on Oracle T5, Oracle M5, and Fujitsu M10 systems.

And no ... zfs scrub isn't a hidden fsck

I've got quite a number of tweets and mails with the question "But is zfs scrub" not something like fsck. And the answer is "Well ... no".

For Big Data Customers, Top Performance Means High Speed And Low Cost

I hate to quibble with the general manager of IBM’s Power systems division, but his argument that systems speed and power are no longer top priorities for businesses is, to use his own words, “not at all in tune with the market today.”
[...]
As a result, IBM is trying to shift the terms of the debate in order to buy itself some time so that it can try to come up with some sort of story that might blunt the simple facts that Oracle’s new T5 servers have not only posted benchmark results several times faster than comparable IBM products, but are much less expensive as well.

SPARC T5/M5-32 VAR Training Replay NOW AVAILABLE!

Promote to your partners who were unable to attend the SPARC T5/M5-32 VAR Training session on March 28th or if you just want to review some of the content again.

7 big reasons you should be running Solaris on Oracle x86 servers

Oracle’s x86 Systems: The Best x86 Platforms for Oracle Solaris.

Deploying an application in Solaris 11

Glynn takes his time to provide a thorough explanation to anyone who might be entering the world of Solaris 11 and is interested in seeing how things can be put together. Glynn goes over IPS components such as actuators, facets, variants, mediators, a family of pkg* commands, reviews SMF elements such as manifests, profiles, and svcbundle, as well as ties everything into building a zone and performing basic resource management on how the zone consumes network bandwidth.

Oracle Solaris and SPARC Performance, Part 2

This is a perfect example of what we can do by co-engineering the processor, the system, the OS, and the database.

Oracle VM Templates now available on SPARC platforms

Oracle VM Templates provide an innovative approach to deploying a fully configured software stack by offering pre-installed and pre-configured software images. Use of Oracle VM Templates eliminates the installation and configuration costs, and reduces the ongoing maintenance costs helping organizations achieve faster time to market and lower cost of operations. Customers have been enjoying the benefits of accelerating software deployment with Oracle VM Templates on x86 platforms. Now we have made Oracle VM Templates available when deployed with Oracle VM Server for SPARC.

Massive Solaris Scalability for the T5-8 and M5-32, Part 1

How do you scale a general purpose operating system to handle a single system image with 1000's of CPUs and 10's of terabytes of memory? You start with the scalable Solaris foundation. You use superior tools such as Dtrace to expose issues, quantify them, and extrapolate to the future. You pay careful attention to computer science, data structures, and algorithms, when designing fixes. You implement fixes that automatically scale with system size, so that once exposed, an issue never recurs in future systems, and the set of issues you must fix in each larger generation steadily shrinks.

Shared Storage Pools (SSP3) and Disaster Recovery in 30 seconds

Shared Storage Pools - just got even more interesting!

Massive Solaris Scalability for the T5-8 and M5-32, Part 2

Last time, I outlined the general issues that must be addressed to achieve operating system scalability. Next I will provide more detail on what we modified in Solaris to reach the M5-32 scalability level. We worked in most of the major areas of Solaris, including Virtual Memory, Resources, Scheduler, Devices, Tools, and Reboot. Today I cover VM and resources.

Oracle Solaris and SPARC (and x86) Performance, Part 4

Simply speaking, east/west traffic is the traffic that rather than going in and out of the data center (which in the world of this metaphor is called north/south traffic), goes between servers in the same data center -- or even in the same physical server.

Oracle takes apparent step toward standardizing on a single chip design

Analysts say the unveiling of midrange and high-end servers running Oracle-built Sparc chips that share the same architecture is a step toward fulfilling the company's post-Sun plans.

Sizing with rPerf but Don't Forget the Assumptions

POWER Relative Performance (rPerf) is often used as a way to approximate the expected difference in performance between two Power Systems servers. Although rPerf is a useful tool, it is important to understand the limitations of using rPerf to provide an estimate the performance of your specific workloads in your particular environment with a new server.

Systems Strategy Update Hartford CT April 2013

Slides from Systems Strategy Update Hartford CT April 2013 on the SPARC Server Announcement and Oracle Virtual Networking (OVN) also known as Xsigo.

Clonez vos bases avec Oracle Snap Management Utility sur baies Sun ZFS

Voulez-vous utiliser la technique des Snapshots avec vos bases Oracle ? La solution Sun ZFS Storage Appliance peut vous simplifier la vie...

Massive Solaris Scalability for the T5-8 and M5-32, Part 3

Today I conclude this series on M5-32 scalability [ Part1 , Part2 ] with enhancements we made in the Scheduler, Devices, Tools, and Reboot areas of Solaris.

DoD customer receives authority to operate SparcSupercluster

Recently, one of our good U.S. DoD customers purchased a SPARC SuperCluster system and received their "Interim Authority to Operate" on the DoD network. Why is this a big deal? First, allow me provide an overview of the SPARC SuperCluster system.

Oracle Launches T5 and M5 Servers: A New Generation of Oracle's SPARC/Solaris Servers

For longtime Sun customers, the technology refresh will be welcome, leading to improved SPARC server sales right away. But Oracle can be expected to look far beyond its own installed base, planning to grow its total available market (TAM) by taking share from its longtime Unix competitors, IBM and HP. Now that the new T5 and M5 technology is ready, IDC will watch with great interest in coming quarters to see whether the T5 and M5 announcements will lead to near-term market share gain and to a long-awaited turnaround in Oracle's hardware business.

Solaris 11 SRU naming convention change

We're tweaking the naming convention used by Oracle Solaris SRUs (Support Repository Updates) to use a 5-digit version taxonomy.

For example, Oracle Solaris 11.1.6.4.0. The digits represent Release.Update.SRU.Build.Respin. For the above example, Oracle Solaris 11.1 SRU 6.4.

Understanding I/O: Random vs Sequential

I have another article planned for later in this series which describes the inescapable mechanics of disk. For now though, I’ll outline the basics: every time you need to access a block on a disk drive, the disk actuator arm has to move the head to the correct track (the seek time), then the disk platter has to rotate to locate the correct sector (the rotational latency). This mechanical action takes time, just like the sushi travelling around the conveyor belt.

A File System All Its Own

In the past five years, flash memory has progressed from a promising accelerator, whose place in the data center was still uncertain, to an established enterprise component for storing performance-critical data. It's rise to prominence followed its proliferation in the consumer world and the volume economics that followed. With SSDs (solid-state devices), flash arrived in a form optimized for compatibility—just replace a hard drive with an SSD for radically better performance. But the properties of the NAND flash memory used by SSDs differ significantly from those of the magnetic media in the hard drives they often displace. While SSDs have become more pervasive in a variety of uses, the industry has only just started to design storage systems that embrace the nuances of flash memory. As it escapes the confines of compatibility, significant improvements in performance, reliability, and cost are possible.

What is the best platform to run your Oracle Database on?

As a Systems Consultant I am often faced with the following question: What does Oracle recommend as the best platform to run the Oracle DB in large enterprise environments on? Is the Exadata DB Machine the recommended platform? Are SPARC/Solaris servers the way to go? Or should customers consolidate on SPARC SuperCluster setups?

ZFS Analytics

While working with ZFS performance I created a dashboard to get a good overview with lots of different statistics. It's powered by Dtrace, python and graphite. There is a high level of detail but still easy to correlate different statistics.

Oracle Solaris 11 and PCI DSS Compliance

This paper provides guidance to IT professionals who are implementing Oracle Solaris 11 within their Cardholder Data Environment (CDE) and to the Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) assessing those environments. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) applies to all organizations that store, process, or transmit cardholder data. This includes entities such as merchants, service providers, payment gateways, data centers, and outsourced service providers.

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Tuesday 2 April 2013

Oracle have announced new systems based on the new SPARC T5 and M5 processors

By Julien Gabel on Tuesday 2 April 2013, 20:22 - Solaris

Oracle have announced new systems based on the new T5 and M5 processors (thank you Henkis, from It's a UNIX system!, for the following short resume):

  1. T5 16 cores @ 3.6GHz 8MB L3$ 1-8 socket systems PCIe 3.0
  2. M5 6 cores @ 3.6GHz 48MB L3$ 32 socket system PCIe 3.0

The T5 has doubled the number of S3 cores from the T4 and increased the clock frequency to 3.6GHz.

The M5 processor is also based on the S3 core (rebranded M4) clocked at 3.6Ghz but is has 6 cores and 48MB L3$. The M systems supports up to 32 M5 processor so a fully configured systems will have 192 cores and 1536 strands (hardware threads). The M5-32 have 32TB of memory in a single system.

Example of a SPARC T5 configuration:

  • 8 CPU x 16 cores x 8 compute threads = 1024 vCPU
  • 4TB of RAM
  • 8 x 600GB = 4.8TB (10KRPM SAS)
  • 4 x 10GbE
  • 8 RU (Rack Unit)
  • Support Oracle Solaris 10 and Solaris 11
  • Logical Domains (up to 128 by chassis), and Zones (8192 per OS instance)
  • Public list price: 626,000$

Example of a SPARC M5 configuration:

  • 32 CPU x 6 cores x 8 compute threads = 1536 vCPU
  • 32TB of RAM
  • Support Oracle Solaris 10 and Solaris 11
  • Dynamic Domains (up to 4 by chassis), Logical Domains (up to 512 by chassis), and Zones (8192 per OS instance)
  • Public list price: nothing public ;)

All new systems both T5 and M5 supports LDOM (Oracle VM for SPARC), plus the old Dynamic Domain technology for the M5. The M5 gets an ILOM as Service Processor (as for T5 and the x86 server lines), exit the legacy XSCF.

Oracle Unveils SPARC Servers with the World’s Fastest Microprocessor

New SPARC Servers Redefine the Economics of Enterprise Computing: Deliver Extreme Performance and Value for Database and Enterprise Applications, Trump the Competition on Multiple Business-Critical Workloads.

Oracle's new T5 Sparcs boost scalability in chip and chassis

Oracle is launching its much-awaited Sparc T5 processors for entry and midrange servers, along with Sparc M5 processors to effectively replace the iron it currently resells from server and chip partner Fujitsu.

The T5-8 maxxes out at 128 cores, 1,024 threads, and 4TB of memory [...]

At the moment, Oracle is shipping only one box based on the Sparc M5, with 32 sockets, called the Sparc M5-32 (obviously). Fully configured, this big-iron box weighs in at 192 cores, 1,536 threads, and 32TB of main memory. No one has as much memory in a single image today – not IBM, not Silicon Graphics, not HP, and not Fujitsu.

The Sparc M5-32 box puts Oracle/Sun back into big iron.

The SPARC T5 Servers have landed

Having announced the T5 servers doesn't make the T4s go away. It is not a platform replacing technology, but a platform extending one! Oracle is going to offer SPARC T4 and T5 servers side-by-side!

Oracle claims performance crown with SPARC processor

Oracle this morning launched the SPARC T5 processor and servers based on it which the company says are the fastest machines currently in the world.

Ellison aims his first Oracle 'mainframe' at Big Blue.

"These machines deliver better integer performance than the IBM Power series," proclaimed Ellison. "The T5 microprocessor itself delivers better integer performance than IBM's PowerPC chip. Now that is really extraordinary, because IBM has had that lead for a very, very long time for integer rate performance, but that lead now moves over from IBM Power to Sparc T5.

"A lot of people are surprised by this," continued Ellison. "When Oracle bought Sun, a lot of people thought the Sparc microprocessor was a real laggard. There were a lot of people who believed that we would never catch up. Well, we have done better than catch up. We caught up, and then we passed the competition. We passed x86 and we passed IBM Power."

Announcing New SPARC Servers with the World's Fastest Microprocessor

Announcing New SPARC Servers: Webcast replay.

Oracle Processor Core Factor Table

The "Oracle Processor Core Factor Table" has been updated in order to include SPARC T5 and M5: It's 0.5 for both.

Oracle's SPARC T5-2, SPARC T5-4, SPARC T5-8, and SPARC T5-1B Server Architecture White Paper

SPARC M5-32 Server Architecture Whitepaper

Driving Up Price/Performance and Driving Out Cost with Oracle ’s SPARC T5 Servers

Performance & Best Practices

  1. SPARC T5-8 Produces TPC-C Benchmark Single-System World Record Performance
  2. SPARC T5-8 Delivers SPECjEnterprise2010 Benchmark World Record Performance
  3. SPARC T5-2 Achieves SPECjbb2013 Benchmark World Record Result
  4. SPARC T5-8 Realizes SAP SD Two-Tier Benchmark World Record for 8 Chip Systems
  5. SPARC T5 Systems Deliver SPEC CPU2006 Rate Benchmark Multiple World Records
  6. SPARC T5-2 Achieves JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Benchmark World Records
  7. SPARC T5-2 Scores Siebel CRM Benchmark World Record
  8. SPARC T5 Systems Produce Oracle TimesTen Benchmark World Record
  9. SPARC T5-8 Delivers Oracle OLAP World Record Performance
  10. SPARC T5-2 Achieves ZFS File System Encryption Benchmark World Record
  11. SPARC T5-2 Obtains Oracle Internet Directory Benchmark World Record Performance
  12. SPARC T5-2 Scores Oracle FLEXCUBE Universal Banking Benchmark World Record Performance
  13. SPARC T5-2 Performance Running Oracle Fusion Middleware SOA
  14. SPARC T5-1B Performance Running Oracle Communications ASAP
  15. SPARC M5-32 Produces SAP SD Two-Tier Benchmark World Record for SAP Enhancement Package 5 for SAP ERP 6.0

Boom!

So that's quite a "boom." With the launch of the new SPARC T5 and M5 series of servers, we've set over a dozen new performance records, and shown that back in 2010 Oracle did indeed establish a SPARC roadmap that it could execute on.

Hot Chips 24: SPARC T5 Overview

Every year, the best of engineering talent comes together in academia for Hot Chips conference, to present the best system designs. During Hot Chips 24, Session 9 - the SPARC T5 was presented by Sebastian Turullols and Ram Sivaramakrishnan from Oracle on Wednesday, August 29, 2012. This processor was released 6 months later, by Oracle with their T5 systems on Tuesday March 26, 2013.

SPARC T5 System Performance for Encryption Microbenchmark

The cryptography benchmark suite was internally developed by Oracle to measure the maximum throughput of in-memory, on-chip encryption operations that a system can perform. Multiple threads are used to achieve the maximum throughput. Systems powered by Oracle's SPARC T5 processor show outstanding performance on the tested encryption operations, beating Intel processor based systems.

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Sunday 31 March 2013

Press Review #21

By Julien Gabel on Sunday 31 March 2013, 22:58 - Solaris

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

Implementing Root Domains with Oracle VM Server for SPARC

This paper describes how to implement an increasingly useful type of virtualization feature known as root domains. It also describes an operational model where root domains can be used in conjunction with Solaris Zones for maximum performance and a high degree of flexibility.

Oracle Magazine: SPARC at 25

The SPARC architecture is perhaps the first and longest lasting open and mainstram computing architecture in human history. In Ocrober 2012, Network Management published a reminder for people to attend the "SPARC at 25" event at the Computer History Museum. In November of 2012, Network Management published an short article pointing to the replay of the historic events: SPARC at 25: Past, Present, and Future. Diana Reichardt published an article "SPARC at 25" in the bi-monthly printed Oracle Magazine, covering the event.

New Tab: OpenSXCE New Distribution!

OpenSolaris grew from an Open Source repository to Open Solaris Distribution (for both Intel and SPARC.) Solaris Express Community Edition (Solaris SXCE) was the Intel/SPARC forerunner of Oracle Solaris 11, which abandoned UltraSPARC processors. OpenSXCE, based upon the work of MarTUX, brings OpenIndiana and Illumos back to SPARC as a full distribution, based upon standards such as SVR4 packaging.

Encapsulating Oracle Databases with Oracle Solaris 11 Zones

Implementing higher degrees of isolation can be accomplished by encapsulating each database environment. Encapsulation can be accomplished with physical or logical isolation techniques. Oracle recently certified 11gR2 RAC in Solaris 11 Zones, which is an important capability for database clouds, because it enables strong isolation between databases consolidated together on a shared hardware and O/S infrastructure.

How to Build a Secure Cluster

This article discusses how to enable Trusted Extensions on an Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1 cluster and configure a labeled-branded Exclusive-IP type of zone cluster.

How to Install Oracle Linux 6.3 with a Btrfs Root File System

This article is a step-by-step guide for installing Oracle Linux 6.3 with a Btrfs root file system on an Oracle VM guest.

Improve Your Hardware Support Experience

Oracle Hardware customers who are running Oracle Solaris or Oracle Solaris x86, can improve their support experience. Oracle Support recommends these three Hardware Essentials to all Oracle Hardware customers:

  1. Download and install the Services Tools Bundle.
  2. Set up Oracle Explorer.
  3. Enable Automatic Service Request (ASR).

Console logging in Oracle VM Server for SPARC

A new feature in Oracle VM Server for SPARC provides logging for guest domain consoles. Console I/O - all text on the serial console - is logged for all or selected domains, including text that appears before the domain boots Solaris. Logs are stored in files under the directory /var/log/vntsd/domain. These directories are root-owned to protect them from unauthorized access.

ZFS Write Performance (Impact of fragmentation)

In the past few months, George Wilson and Adam Leventhal made significant improvements to how writes are handled in ZFS. In this multi part blog post, I will talk about a benchmark we created to measure improvements in ZFS write performance as we make changes to the OS. In this post, I will talk about the benchmark setup and run. I will show some of the results from this benchmark on Delphix OS. In part two, I will present data and some analysis on the bottlenecks discovered and how they are going to be addressed.

Performance

Brendan Gregg has written an interesting piece about finding performance problems: "The USE method addresses shortcomings in other commonly used methodologies".

Announcing Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3 3/13

Today we released Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3 3/13 (that's a lot of threes!). This update is specifically for use with Oracle Solaris 10, delivering even more high availability and disaster recovery capabilities for mission-critical application deployments.

What is DSSD building?

The brains behind the ZFS filesystem – including Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore – have been hard at work for several years at start up DSSD. What are they doing with Andy Bechtolsheim’s money?

Welcome to the mainline Linux kernel blog

I'd like to welcome everyone to this new blog, where I'll be discussing what's happening with the Oracle mainline Linux kernel development team. I'm James Morris, manager of the team. I report to Wim Coekaerts. I'm also the maintainer of the Linux kernel security subsystem, which I blog about separately here.

OpenAFS on Solaris 11 x86 - Robert Milkowski

The March Solaris SIG event is about running OpenAFS on Solaris 11 x86. This talk will explore what makes Solaris unique in large OpenAFS deployments with petabytes of storage - how it can save millions of dollars and make debugging and performance analysis much easier and quicker compared to other platforms. Some of the unique features of OpenAFS will be described and how we used them to migrate one of the largest OpenAFS deployments in the world - completely on-line and transparently to AFS clients. Real world examples of how DTrace was used to improve OpenAFS performance and scalability will be discussed.

Dear StorageMojo: should I go all SSD?

This came in this morning’s email from a reader I’ll call Perplexed. How would you advise Perplexed?

10Gbit Ethernet, bad assumption and Best Practice - Part 1

We find many people are over optimistic and making assumptions - which can catch them out - we learnt the hard way too.

PowerVM Virtual Ethernet Speed is often confused with VIOS, SEA IVE/HEA speed

I have had a couple of Power systems administrators make assumptions about the virtual Ethernet speed improvements when they install a 10 Gb IVE/HEA in a VIOS which are simply not true. I guess that if three teams have made this mistake then others are about too. So I intend here to put the record straight.

a few words about EtherChannel

Originally, this technology was meant to protect a host against a failure of its network adapter and/or switch (network switch). Additionally, some unscrupulous salesmen claimed a fantastic increase in throughput aka two adapters tied together will double, three adapters tied together will triple throughput of the associated with them EtherChannel adapter – yes, in a salesman pure land of fantasy.

Less known Solaris Features: Highly available loadbalancing

As you may know, Solaris contains an integrated load balancer. It's really easy to configure. Not that well known is the point, that you can make it higly-available in an easy way as well. The following tutorial will give you an overview on the configuration of this feature.

Less known Solaris Features - Data Link Multipathing

I used this feature in the HA-loadbalancing tutorial already. However the future too useful to stay just a "by-word" in a different article. It is DLMP. Or by its full name:"Data Link Multipathing".

SVM hang due to error disk (analyze)

Last weekend, I found the origin of the SVM bug using the mdb tool. Good reading !!

After restarting the server, I wanted to mount a filesystem (metaset object), but the following command was not responding...

Less known, but frequently used Solaris feature: Address space layout randomisation

One of the features introduced with 11.1 is the Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) . And when you work with 11.1 you are already using it. So it's a less known, but frequently used feature: less known in the point that it exists, less known in the point of the methods to control it, frequently used as it's activated per default for selected binaries (and many were selected).

How to Use an Existing Oracle Solaris 10 JumpStart Server to Provision Oracle Solaris 11 11/11

This article illustrates how to take an existing JumpStart server, install the Oracle Solaris 11 Provisioning Assistant for Oracle Solaris 10 on it, create and configure an installation service, and then provision a client system using that installation service.

Q&A About the Latest Oracle Linux Releases

We sat down with Monica Kumar, Senior Director, Oracle Linux, Oracle Virtualization, and MySQL Product Marketing, to discuss the latest update on Oracle Linux.

Exemple: Link Aggregations and VLAN Configurations for your consolidation (Solaris 11 and Solaris Zone)

Everyone knows that one of the major problem for consolidating Solaris 10 is network. if each Solaris Zones use a different network (vlan), the configuration of the Global Zone becomes a real headache.

No, ZFS still doesn't need a fsck. Really!

Friday was a day that i called once 10k day. More 10.000 visitors to my blog in one day. Saturday was similar. This surge was create by an link on news.ycombinator.com article i wrote roughly four years ago about ZFS: No, ZFS really doesn't need a fsck.

Just wanted to express that four years later and a lot more experience with ZFS later, 12 years after ZFS saw the light of the word, i'm more of the opinion that ZFS doesn't need a fsck than ever.

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Friday 1 March 2013

Press Review #20

By Julien Gabel on Friday 1 March 2013, 09:53 - Solaris

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

Network Virtualization and Network Resource Management

After discussing Oracle VM, OS virtualization, and some aspects of resource management in the previous articles of this series, this article will now cover a special area of resource management and virtualization of resources: network virtualization and network resource management.

The network is a special shared resource that glues all the virtual machines (VMs), zones, and systems together and provides a communication channel with the world. Thus, the network is a very important layer of the virtualization stack.

Oracle: Solaris 10 Update 11 Released!

Solaris 10 was launched in 2005, with ground-breaking features like: DTrace, SMF (Services), Zones, LDom's, and later ZFS. The latest, and perhaps last, update of Solaris 10 was expected in 2012, to co-inside with an early release of the SPARC T5. In 2013, Oracle released yet another update, suggesting the T5 is close to release. The latest installment of Solaris 10 is referred to as 01/13 release, for January 2013, appears to be the final SVR4 Solaris release, with expected normal Oracle support extending to 2018. Many serious administrators will refer to this release as Solaris 10 Update 11.

IBM Announces updated Power710 to 740 and brand new Power 750/760

This time it was very different as looking at the POWER7+ Power 750/760 s we thought: "Hang on!! We have seen this before! It looks just like a Power770 but one U taller (5U instead of 4U)." So it is a completely different machine inside - if it was not for the 32 CPU cores in the Power 750 model and so fits in the uprated range in the same place, it should have been given new number. I guess using the same number means we all know where it fits. The 760 is very much the same machine but with all the higher features as the 750 but you can't convert between them.

Consommation CPU & Gestion mémoire (2ème partie)

Cela fait déjà un petit moment que j'ai écrit la 1er partie de cet article et j'imagine que vous aviez hâte dans connaître le dénouement ?

Pour rappel, la forte consommation CPU (notamment le temps system) provenait de l'agent Grid d'Oracle. Suite à la modification dans le kernel du mode d'allocation des pages (pg_contig_disable), la charge CPU semblait se répartir plus équitablement entre le temps system et le temps user. Mais... quelque chose me choquait encore...

Création d'un serveur AI personnalisé (archi Sparc)

Après avoir créé vos repos (méthode pas-à-pas disponible dans un précédant article), il est temps de créer votre serveur AI personnalisé. Je vais découper ce sujet en deux partie, un article sur l'architecture Sparc et un autre sur l'architecture x86. Et pourquoi donc ? J'utilise deux méthodes d'initialisations différentes, wanboot pour l'architecture Sparc et la paire pxe/dhcp pour l'architecture x86. Du coup je préfère distinguer ces deux architectures.

Observations : analyse d'un core "...Unable to fork..."

Les apparences sont quelques fois trompeuses… Petite démonstration confirmant cet adage.

Situons le contexte : plusieurs DBA Oracle nous remontent un incident sur un de leur serveur. Le symptôme étant le suivant : connexion impossible. Après une rapide vérification le diagnostic initiale semble être le bon. Petite connexion au déport console du serveur et me voilà devant un message des plus explicite « Unable to fork ». Hop, je provoque un petit panic et en avant pour une petite analyse.

Création d'un serveur AI personnalisé (archi x86)

Lors d'un précédent article, j'ai traité la mise en place d'un serveur AI personnalisé pour l'architecture Sparc (déploiement via Wanboot). Comme convenu, je vais traité ici la mise en place d'un serveur AI mais sur l'architecture x86. La différence entre ces deux architectures (d'un point vue installation) se situe principalement sur la phase d'initialisation juste avant le début de l'installation.

Sur une architecture x86, la phase d'initialisation est le plus souvent exécutée par le couple pxe / dhcp. Il est donc nécessaire de configurer un serveur dhcp permettant d'interpréter la requête pxe que le client enverra. Il peut s'agir d'un serveur dédié ou mutualisé avec le serveur AI. Dans mon exemple ci-dessous, il n'y a qu'un serveur pour la configuraton dhcp et AI.

Best Practices - Top Ten Tuning Tips

Oracle VM Server for SPARC is a high performance virtualization technology for SPARC servers. It provides native CPU performance without the virtualization overhead typical of hypervisors. The way memory and CPU resources are assigned to domains avoids problems often seen in other virtual machine environments, and there are intentionally few "tuning knobs" to adjust.

However, there are best practices that can enhance or ensure performance. This blog post lists and briefly explains performance tips and best practices that should be used in most environments.

Oracle VM Manager used with SPARC - demo

Rather than describe this in text, the best thing to do is show it in demo format. Fortunately, the wizardly Steen Schmidt has produced outstanding Youtube videos showing Oracle VM Manager in action at https://www.youtube.com/user/gandalf3100.

Serial Console with VirtualBox on Solaris host

First make sure you have nc(1) available it is in the pkg:/network/netcat package.

Then configure COM1 serial port in the VM settings as a pipe. Tell VirtualBox the name you want for the pipe and get it to create it.

The Year in Review

As 2012 comes to a close, I thought it would be a good time to look back at some of the changes that have been made to the Trusted Extensions features in Oracle Solaris.

Linux YAMA Security equivalents in Solaris

The Linux YAMA Loadable Security Module (LSM) provides a small number of protections over and above standard DAC (Discretionary Access Controls). These can be roughly mapped over to Solaris as follows...

Itanium: Another Step Closer to Death

Intel had produced the Itanium architecture to compete in the higher-end 64 bit arena and eventually sun-set their aging 32 bit x64 architecture. With the release of AMD's x64 architecture, and vendors such as Sun Microsystems abandoning the Itanium roadmap for AMD x64 - pressure was placed upon Intel to include 64 bit instructions in the x86 chipset. Now with Intel x86 supporting 64 bit processing, there is little reason for Itanium to exist, placing pressure on remaining Itanum system vendors.

How to Update A Linux Kernel Without Rebooting

The uptrack-update command applies patches to your Linux kernel while your system is still running. A Ksplice Uptrack subscription gets you so much more than rebootless kernel updates. Here are some details.

Configuring a Basic LDAP Server + Client in Solaris 11

Solaris 11 ships with OpenLDAP to use as an LDAP server. To configure, you're going to need a simple slapd.conf file and an LDIF schema file to populate the database.

How to Configure the Linux Out-of-Memory Killer

This article describes the Linux out-of-memory (OOM) killer and how to find out why it killed a particular process. It also provides methods for configuring the OOM killer to better suit the needs of many different environments.

Observation : fastresync et ACFS

Petite observation lors d’une recette cluster d’un Oracle RAC 11gR2 sur Solaris 10 Sparc. Pendant le test suivant « perte d’une baie SAN », nous avons observé un petit problème lors de la resynchronisation des diskgroups ASM utilisant des volumes sous ACFS. Nous nous attendions à utiliser la fonctionnalité fastresync et pourtant...

Announcing Oracle Linux 6.4

The Oracle Linux team is pleased to announce the availability of Oracle Linux 6.4, the fourth update release for Oracle Linux 6.

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Friday 1 February 2013

Press Review #19

By Julien Gabel on Friday 1 February 2013, 14:00 - Solaris

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

Oracle Linux Ksplice offline client

By introducing the offline client, customers with Oracle Linux Premier or Oracle Linux Premier Limited support can create a local intranet yum repository that creates a local mirror of the ULN ksplice channel and just use the yum update command to install the latest ksplice updates. This will allow customers to have just one server connected to the oracle server and every other system just have a local connection.

Resource Management as an Enabling Technology for Virtualization

In this article and the next, we will cover some enabling technologies for virtualization. Here, we discuss IT resource management as an enabling technology for virtualization.

Oracle Premier Support for Oracle Solaris 10 extended by 3 years - now ends January 2018

Release        GA Date         Premier Support Ends    Extended Support Ends   Sustaining Support Ends
Solaris 10      Jan 2005        Jan 2018                Jan 2021                Indefinite
Solaris 11      Nov 2011        Nov 2021                Nov 2024                Indefinite

BrandZ Solaris 10 (exemples de migration P2V et V2V)

Comment réduire efficacement les coûts d'une infrastructure de serveurs sous Solaris 10 ? En les consolidant !! Cela va de soi, la forte utilisation des zones en est un très bonne exemple. Oui mais... Pourquoi ne pas utiliser les nouvelles possibilités qui s'offrent à nous : Un serveur sous Solaris 11 et des brandZ Solaris 10.

Je vous présente deux exemples rapides de migration d'environnements Solaris 10 physique (P2V) et Solaris 10 zone (V2V) sur un serveur Solaris 11.

Virtualization Performance: Zones, KVM, Xen

At Joyent we run a high-performance public cloud based on two different virtualization technologies: Zones and KVM. We have historically run Xen as well, but have phased it out for KVM on SmartOS. My job is to make things go fast, which often means using DTrace to analyze the kernel, applications, and those virtualization technologies. In this post I’ll summarize their performance in four ways: characteristics, block diagrams, internals, and results.

TPM Key Migration in Solaris

"TPM" stands for "Trusted Platform Module," a hardware device that provides many security functions, including storage of encryption keys. [...] In Solaris 11.1, Wyllys Ingersoll added the ability to migrate keys from one TPM to another TPM. TPM migration is is especially useful when upgrading hardware, migrating a system to a new platform, or after reinitializing the TPM. The following describes this new feature.

What's new in User Rights Management

Way back in Solaris 8 we introduced an extensible database, user_attr(4), where we could maintain the security attributes of each user. Originally the database included just three properties: roles, auths, and profiles. [...] Since then we have been adding new properties in each Solaris release, while preserving backward compatibility in both the file /etc/user_attr and the corresponding LDAP schema. To avoid dealing with an alphabet full of new options, we standardized on the -K option, which can be used to set the values of any property.

LDoms IO Best Practices

Stefan Hinker discuss different IO options for both disk and networking and give some recommends on how you to choose the right ones for your environment. A couple hints about performance are also included.

T4 & the Red Crypto Stack

Heinz-Wilhelm Fabry and Stefan Hinker show how to use encryption and other security mechanisms throughout the red stack to deploy a quite well secured database.

Why Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Is So Bullish on Sun Hardware

In the past decade, Oracle has acquired about 90 companies. And out of all of those deals, Larry Ellison recently cited the 2009 acquisition of Sun Microsystems as “the most strategic and profitable acquisition Oracle has ever made.”

ZFS Compression Enhancements in illumos

The ZFS code in illumos has gained another differentiator thanks to the hard work of Saso, who integrated LZ4 improved compression into our code base.

Solaris 11 IPS Concepts, Issues, and Workarounds

Image Packaging System (IPS) is a single tier packaging architecture which in Oracle Solaris 11, and other Oracle Sun products such as Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.x, replaces the previous SVR4-based dual tier packaging and patching architecture.

Oracle Delivers On SPARC Promises

In a nutshell, SPARC/Solaris customers are looking at a predictable long-term future of improved and very competitive performance and price-performance scaling for Oracle hardware, especially when coupled with Oracle software in its “engineered systems.” Oracle and IBM will remain in a strong competition for performance and price-performance across a variety of workloads, and competitive pressures will ensure a decade of strong systems platforms for high-end UNIX workloads regardless of the eventual fate of HP’s Itanium platforms.

How to Configure a Failover Guest Domain in an Oracle Solaris Cluster

The configuration described in this article enables the protection of guest domains from planned and unplanned downtime by automating the failover of a guest domain through restart on an alternate cluster node. Automated failover provides protection in case there is a component outage or the guest domain needs to be migrated for preventive maintenance.

Compliance reporting with SCAP

In Solaris 11.1 we added the early stages of our (security) Compliance framework. We have (like some other OS vendors) selected to use the SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol) standard from NIST. There are a number of different parts to SCAP but for Compliance reporting one of the important parts is the OVAL (Open Vulnerability Assesment Language) standard. This is what allows us to write a checkable security policy and verify it against running systems.

Fujitsu launches 'Athena' Sparc64-X servers in Japan

Japanese IT giant and long-time Sparc partner with Sun Microsystems and now Oracle has let slip the details on its "Athena" line servers based on its own sixteen-core Sparc64-X processors, which bear the same code-name inside Fujitsu. And it looks like Oracle is going to be reselling them, too.

Evaluating Oracle Solaris 11 from Inside Oracle VM VirtualBox

This article describes how to evaluate Oracle Solaris 11—without having to install it on the bare metal—by importing it into Oracle VM VirtualBox, configuring it, exploring basic administrative tasks, and connecting to the network.

grub2 : configuration de la console série

Depuis Solaris 11 update 1, le chain loader utilisé pour les plateforme x86 est GRUB2. Le fichier de configuration présent dans GRUB (menu.lst) est remplacé par un nouveau fichier nommé grub.cfg. L'édition de ce fichier est normallement déconseillé, du coup la mise à jour s'effectue via la commande bootadm.

How to Use Signed Kernel Modules

Loadable kernel modules allow you to add code to a running Linux kernel. Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel provides signed kernel modules to further protect the kernel. This article explains how to use this feature.

Création pas-à-pas des repos sous Solaris 11

Ci-joint la procédure de création pas-à-pas des principales repo pour Solaris 11. Rien de plus simple... vous allez voir !

Deep Inside Every Sysadmin Is...

... an Oracle ACE! The thrills. The glory. The fame. Who can resist? Turns out sysadmins can.

Updating and patching Oracle Linux using yum and Ksplice

Oracle Linux provides two complimentary technologies for patching and updating the operating system. [...] This is where Ksplice enters the picture. It is a technology that allows you to apply critical fixes to the Linux kernel at run time, without the need to reboot your system. This is a feature that is unique to Oracle Linux.

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Monday 31 December 2012

Press Review #18

By Julien Gabel on Monday 31 December 2012, 15:21 - Solaris

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

Best Practices for Building a Virtualized SPARC Computing Environment

This best practices guide provides a solution for a SPARC virtualized environment that hosts general computing workloads.

The Role of Oracle Solaris Zones and Linux Containers in a Virtualization Strategy

In the previous two articles of this series, we covered Oracle VM Server for SPARC and Oracle VM Server for x86, which provide hypervisor-based hardware virtualization. Now, we will cover the operating system level of virtualization, which is one type of software virtualization, by looking at Oracle Solaris Zones and Linux Containers.

Using rrdtool to graph vmstat output - a worked example

rrdtool is a fantastically brilliant command to have in your toolbox. Up there with awk, grep, sed, Apache, ksh, and nmon (of course). It is used to save data in a fixed size "database", does cascade summation of older data to keep the data volume down, it can extract the data across any period and then it can quickly generate impressive .gif file graphs from the data - which are perfect for displaying on a webserver.

Compiling for T4

I've recently had quite a few queries about compiling for T4 based systems. So it's probably a good time to review what I consider to be the best practices.

Solaris 11 pkg fix is my new friend

While putting together some examples of the Solaris 11 Automated Installer (AI), I managed to really mess up my system, to the point where AI was completely unusable. This was my fault as a combination of unfortunate incidents left some remnants that were causing problems, so I tried to clean things up. Unsuccessfully. Perhaps that was a bad idea (OK, it was a terrible idea), but this is Solaris 11 and there are a few more tricks in the sysadmin toolbox.

ZFS fundamentals: transaction groups

I’ve continued to explore ZFS as I try to understand performance pathologies, and improve performance. A particular point of interest has been the ZFS write throttle, the mechanism ZFS uses to avoid filling all of system memory with modified data.

Local, Near, Far part 12 - I have a 10 core POWER7 chip, eh!

Previously I said the POWER Hypervisor decides where to put a Virtual Machine (VM/LPAR) based on the Virtual Processor number (spreading factor). Well, apart from it nearly being right ... I was actually wrong! I got talking to one of these very impressive Hypervisor developers in Germany and he put me right.

USENIX LISA 2012: Performance Analysis Methodology

At USENIX LISA 2012, I gave a talk titled Performance Analysis Methodology. This covered ten performance analysis anti-methodologies and methodologies, including the USE Method. I wrote about these in the ACMQ article Thinking Methodically about Performance, which is worth reading for more detail. I’ve also posted USE Method-derived checklists for Solaris- and Linux-based systems.

Shared Storage Pools 3 and Systems Director 6.3.2

The new VIOS Shared Storage Pools 3 (SSP3) arrived a month ago and I have all my VIOS updated now to VIOS 2.2.2.1 plus fixes. This brings with it the regular VIOS improvements but also new features for SSP3 including...

Oracle affiche de forts bénéfices et loue l'apport de Sun Microsystems

Concernant Sun Microsystems, racheté par Oracle il y a trois ans pour 7,4 milliards de dollars, Larry Ellison, le PDG d'Oracle, estime que « Sun s'est avéré être l'une des acquisitions les plus stratégiques et rentables que nous n'ayons jamais fait ». Une affirmation basée sur la forte rentabilité d'Oracle sur les systèmes d'ingénierie et sur l'impact de Sun sur la croissance de ses activités matérielles, qui perdent pourtant en chiffre d'affaires.

Ops Center Solaris 11 IPS Repository Management: Using ISO Images

With Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c, you can provision, patch, monitor and manage Oracle Solaris 11 instances. To do this, Ops Center creates and maintains a Solaris 11 Image Packaging System (IPS) repository on the Enterprise Controller. During the Enterprise Controller configuration, you can load repository content directly from Oracle's Support Web site and subsequently synchronize the repository as new content becomes available.

Of course, you can also use Solaris 11 ISO images to create and update your Ops Center repository.

Using Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center to Update Solaris via Live Upgrade

This Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center blog entry provides tips for using Ops Center to update Solaris using Live Upgrade on Solaris 10 and Boot Environments on Solaris 11.

Locating WWPNs on Linux servers

I do a lot of storage-related work, and often times need to grab WWPNs to zone hosts and to mask storage. To gather the WWPNs I would often times use the following script on my RHEL and CentOS servers...

The USE Method: SmartOS Performance Checklist

The USE Method provides a strategy for performing a complete check of system health, identifying common bottlenecks and errors. For each system resource, metrics for utilization, saturation and errors are identified and checked. Any issues discovered are then investigated using further strategies.

In this post, I’ll provide an example of a USE-based metric list for use within a SmartOS SmartMachine (Zone), such as those provided by the Joyent Public Cloud.

Resolving Duplicate disk/device entries in “vxdisk list” or vxdisksetup

One fine morning I had a undertaking to replace the disk which was part of VxVM. Easy enough – just another routine stuff [...] Everything you do or don’t do has an inherent risk !!!

Weird issue with VERITAS after replacing the disk

When performing a disk replacement in VxVM 4.1 and VxVM 5.0, the disk being replaced does not show up in the output of a "vxdisk list" command. Instead a "NONAMEs2" entry is seen...

Announcement: DTrace for Oracle Linux General Availability

Today we are announcing the general availability of DTrace for Oracle Linux. It is available to download from ULN for Oracle Linux Support customers.

"getent hosts" on IPv4/IPv6. Linux vs. Solaris

"getent hosts (server name)" is typically run when one wants to check whether /etc/nsswitch.conf is correctly set up. I recently found differences between Linux and Solaris when it tries to find IPv4/IPv6 addresses.

What's up with LDoms: Part 6 - Sizing the IO Domain

By now, we've seen how to create the basic setup, create a simple domain and configure networking and disk IO. We know that for typical virtual IO, we use vswitches and virtual disk services to provide virtual network and disk services to the guests. The question to address here is: How much CPU and memory is required in the Control and IO-domain (or in any additional IO domain) to provide these services without being a bottleneck?

zfsday: ZFS Performance Analysis and Tools

At zfsday 2012, I gave a talk on ZFS performance analysis and tools, discussing the role of old and new observability tools for investigating ZFS, including many based on DTrace. This was a fun talk – probably my best so far – spanning performance analysis from the application level down through the kernel and to the storage device level.

My background with ZFS includes leading various performance work for the world’s first ZFS-based storage appliance at Sun Microsystems and later Oracle, and now further analysis and tuning as Joyent’s lead performance engineer where we run a public cloud on ZFS. Given the risk of other tenants (noisy neighbors) interfering with your performance, I can’t imagine running a cloud on anything else. This talk includes the tools and tuning we use to make sure ZFS runs smoothly.

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Friday 30 November 2012

Press Review #17

By Julien Gabel on Friday 30 November 2012, 10:34 - Solaris

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

OS Analytics - Deep Dive Into Your OS

Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides a feature called "OS Analytics". This feature allows you to get a better understanding of how the Operating System is being utilized. You can research the historical usage as well as real time data. This post will show how you can benefit from OS Analytics and how it works behind the scenes.

Solaris 11.1: Changes to included FOSS packages

  1. Solaris 11 can update more readily than Solaris 10
  2. Core OS Functionality
  3. Developer Stack
  4. Desktop Stack
  5. Detailed list of changes

debugging IO calls in Solaris 11 with kstat

Solaris 11 update 1 was released just a few days ago and I have been curious to find out about new features. One of the things mentioned in the What’s-New guide that caught my attention were “File System Statistics for Oracle Solaris Zones”. Until now, there was no way to tell which zone was responsible for how much IO. [...] This is where these new kstat statistics for each filesystem type in each zone come in handy.

My splitvg Went Splat (updated)

A couple of years ago I wrote about the splitvg command. This takes a volume group (VG) that has been mirrored using mirrorvg, and effectively breaks off one copy of the mirror, turning it into a point-in-time snapshot. The snapshot can then be used for reports, backups or for building a new database. I'm not sure how much this is used in the real world these days, but if you are still doing your backups this way, perhaps it's time to revisit the strategy.

Can Oracle REALLY Increase Throughput by 6x?

During some SPARC road map discussions, a particular anonymous IBM POWER enthusiast inquires:

"How... are 192 S3 cores going to provide x6 throughput of 128 SPARC64-VII+ cores?"

Unexpected advantage of Engineered Systems

It's not surprising that Engineered Systems accelerate the debugging and resolution of customer issues. But what has surprised me is just how much faster issue resolution is with Engineered Systems such as SPARC SuperCluster. These are powerful, complex, systems used by customers wanting extreme database performance, app performance, and cost saving server consolidation.

What's up with LDoms: Part 5 - A few Words about Consoles

Back again to look at a detail of LDom configuration that is often forgotten - the virtual console server.

25 Years of SPARC, 20 Years of Solaris

Faster Memory Allocation Using vmtasks

What is vmtasks, and why should you care? In a nutshell, vmtasks accelerates creation, locking, and destruction of pages in shared memory segments.

Introducing RedPatch

The Ksplice team is happy to announce the public availability of one of our git repositories, RedPatch. RedPatch contains the source for all of the changes Red Hat makes to their kernel, one commit per fix and we've published it on oss.oracle.com/git.

Patching a miniroot image (astuce)

Petite astuce pour la mise à jour kernel d'un miniroot Solaris 10. Mais avant de commencer, parlons un peu du contexte. Lors d'une migration p2v d'un serveur Sparc vers une Ldom, j'ai rencontré l'erreur suivante lors de l'extraction de l'archive flar.

Oracle Solaris: Zones on Shared Storage

One of the significant new features, and the most significant new feature related to Oracle Solaris Zones, is casually called "Zones on Shared Storage" or simply ZOSS (rhymes with "moss"). ZOSS offers much more flexibility because you can store Solaris Zones on shared storage (surprise!) so that you can perform quick and easy migration of a zone from one system to another. This blog entry describes and demonstrates the use of ZOSS.

IBM POWER 7+ Better Late than Never?

Just announced, via TPM at The Register, is the ability to provision an IBM p260 with new POWER 7+ processors!

Automatic Storage Tiering

Automatic Storage Tiering or Hierarchical Storage Management is the process of placing the most data onto storage which is most cost effective, while meeting basic accessibility and efficient requirements. There has been much movement over the past half-decade in storage management.

Looking "Under the Hood" at Networking in Oracle VM Server for x86

Normally, you configure Oracle VM Server for x86 networking with the Oracle VM Manager GUI. The GUI simplifies administration, speeds deployment, and reduces the chance of configuration errors. Hiding the implementation details using the GUI has its benefits, but here on the Oracle Technology Network, we like to expose the heart of the machine; it's not only interesting, but it can help you troubleshoot problems that might arise.

Oh my god, it's full of threads ... and out of memory

This is for the people with the really large systems (however thread wise a T4-2 or T4-1 can be really large systems). Imagine you have dozens to hundreds of zones. All with thousands of threads. Or you have an extreme number of ZFS pools ... with all their zpool processes and a lot of zones with a lot of processes.

Solaris x86 sur serveur Dell (gamme PowerEdge Rxx0)

Petit article sur la configuration du déport Console Série et des interruptions NMI sur les serveurs Dell (gamme PowerEdge Rxx0).

VIOS SEA Failover flapping on backup SEA

Why is the backup SEA adapter of my SEA failover flapping from Primary to Backup repeatedly?

Consommation CPU & Gestion mémoire (1er partie)

Première partie d'une analyse effectuée sur un système Solaris 10 exécutant plusieurs bases de données Oracle. Les symptômes remontés par l'équipe DBA sont les suivants : temps de réponse long sur plusieurs bases.

Logical Domains Manager (v 3.0.0.0.28)

Oracle have release Oracle VM for SPARC 3.0 (LDOM).

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Tuesday 30 October 2012

Press Review #16

By Julien Gabel on Tuesday 30 October 2012, 16:47 - Solaris

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

What's up with LDoms: Part 4 - Virtual Networking Explained

In this article, we'll have a closer look at virtual networking. Basic connectivity as we've seen it in the first, simple example, is easy enough. But there are numerous options for the virtual switches and virtual network ports, which we will discuss in more detail now. In this section, we will concentrate on virtual networking - the capabilities of virtual switches and virtual network ports - only. Other options involving hardware assignment or redundancy will be covered in separate sections later on.

Best Practices - which domain types should be used to run applications

One question that frequently comes up is "which types of domain should I use to run applications?" There used to be a simple answer in most cases: "only run applications in guest domains", but enhancements to T-series servers, Oracle VM Server for SPARC and the advent of SPARC SuperCluster have made this question more interesting and worth qualifying differently. This article reviews the relevant concepts and provides suggestions on where to deploy applications in a logical domains environment.

Power Champions! POWER7+ is here!

Finally, I got the invite to join the Power Champions. Three days of news and information before today's announcements . It has been quite an experience - finally hearing the news directly from the developers, project managers, etc. rather than only reading several stack of slides.

Oracle Announces Oracle Solaris 11.1 at Oracle OpenWorld

Adds Unique Oracle Database Support, Extends Cloud Infrastructure Capabilities and Delivers New Security and Compliance Features for Highly Available Enterprise Application Deployments.

Announcing Oracle Solaris 11.1

This document highlights some of the many changes that have occurred since the introduction of Oracle Solaris 11 11/11. It should be read in conjunction with the release notes and documentation for the product.

IPS changes in Solaris 11.1, brought to you by the letter ‘P’

I thought it might be a good idea to put together a post about some of the IPS changes that appear in Solaris 11.1. To make it more of a challenge, everything I’m going to talk about here, begins with the letter ‘P‘.

Measurement artifact

The application was throughoutly instrumented by means of something i will call "middleware" and so the customer thought he was able to see how long a job on the system took and how much CPU was used.

However the numbers were strange: High throughput, short time to complete the job, however the CPU time used for a job looked strange. Something in there was something wrong with the CPU times. Just a guess. A feeling. Not really knowing.

Doubled memory capacity on T4-4

There is only one thing that's better than a lot of memory in a system: More memory! So it's quite nice that there is a new memory options with the T4-4 system. You can now plug 32 GB DIMMS into the systems. The T4-4 can now hold 2 TB of main memory.

SPARC Processor Roadmap Updated

The updated SPARC Processor Roadmap is now available here. The roadmap provides data on the M-series,l the T-series and the T-4 series from 2011 through 2016. During that period the M-series is scheduled to add up to 10x throughput; and the T-series an additional 4.5x throughput. Thread strength is also set to increase in both series through that period. Dates are also outlined for expectd updates to Solaris 10 OS and Solaris 11 OS.

Disks lie. And the controllers that run them are partners in crime.

Most applications do not deal with disks directly, instead storing their data in files in a file system, which protects us from those scoundrel disks. After all, a key task of the file system is to ensure that the file system can always be recovered to a consistent state after an unplanned system crash (for example, a power failure). While a good file system will be able to beat the disks into submission, the required effort can be great and the reduced performance annoying. This article examines the shortcuts that disks take and the hoops that file systems must jump through to get the desired reliability.

Solaris 11.1 announced

Solaris 11.1 have been announced and will be released later this month. It is the first update of Solaris 11 since it release november last year. It contains a few interesting features, I've only list a few, over 200 projects have integrated into this release.

SPARC T5, M4 and SPARC64-X

Short summary of SPARC processor information that was disclosed at Oracle world, in the near future Oracle will release two different SPARC processors and Fujitsu will release a new SPARC64 processor with support for LDOM.

nicstat update - version 1.92

Another minor nicstat release is now available.

Solaris 11 SRU / Update relationship explained, and blackout period on delivery of new bug fixes eliminated

  • Relationship between SRUs and Update releases
  • Changes to SRU and Update Naming Conventions
  • No Blackout Periods on Bug Fix Releases

Active Benchmarking

Benchmarking is often done badly: tools are run ad-hoc, without understanding what they are testing or checking that the results are valid. This can lead to poor architectural choices that haunt you later on. I previously summarized this situation as: casual benchmarking: you benchmark A, but actually measure B, and conclude you’ve measured C.

How to Update to Oracle Solaris 11.1 Using the Image Packaging System

This article details the steps required to update your Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 systems to Oracle Solaris 11.1 using the Image Packaging System (IPS).

Morgan Stanley chooses Solaris 11 to run cloud file services

I came across this blog entry and the accompanying presentation by Robert Milkowski about his experience switching from Linux to Oracle Solaris 11 for a distributed OpenAFS file serving environment at Morgan Stanley.

IDC Recommends Oracle Solaris 11

IDC published a research report this week on Oracle Solaris 11 and described it as "Delivering unique value." The report emphasizes the ability of Oracle Solaris to scale up and provide a mission critical platform for a wide variety of computing. Solaris built-in server and network virtualization helps to lower costs and enable consolidation while reducing administration costs and risks.

How to Migrate Your Data to Oracle Solaris 11 Using Shadow Migration

Data migration is a fundamental building block of an Oracle Solaris 11 adoption strategy. This article describes shadow migration, which is a technology for moving large amounts of data from one file system to another while the data remains online and accessible to users.

Oracle rolls up and rolls out Solaris 11.1 update

Tweaked Solaris Cluster 4.1 system lasher tags along

Solaris 11, which debuted a year ago, was the first major release of the Unix operating system that spans Sparc, Sparc64, and x86 iron to come out since the former Sun Microsystems launched Solaris 10 in January 2005. Oracle had previewed some of the features in Solaris 11.1 and today it put the code into the field and gave some more details on the nips and tuck and tweaks in the update.

Using svcbundle to Create SMF Manifests and Profiles in Oracle Solaris 11

This articles covers a new utility introduced in Oracle Solaris 11.1, svcbundle, and shows how developers and administrators can use it to integrate their applications with SMF more quickly.

How to Migrate Oracle Database from Oracle Solaris 8 to Oracle Solaris 11

How to use the Oracle Solaris 8 P2V (physical to virtual) Archiver tool, which comes with Oracle Solaris Legacy Containers, to migrate a physical Oracle Solaris 8 system with Oracle Database 10.2 and an Oracle Automatic Storage Management file system into an Oracle Solaris 8 branded zone inside an Oracle Solaris 10 guest domain on top of an Oracle Solaris 11 control domain.

Announcing Release of Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1!

We are very happy to announce the release of Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1, providing High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) capabilities for Oracle Solaris 11.1. This is yet another proof of Oracle's continued investment in Oracle Solaris technologies such as Oracle Solaris Cluster.

Solaris 11.1: Encrypted Immutable Zones on (ZFS) Shared Storage

Solaris 11 brought both ZFS encryption and the Immutable Zones feature and I've talked about the combination in the past. Solaris 11.1 adds a fully supported method of storing zones in their own ZFS using shared storage so lets update things a little and put all three parts together.

no comment

Monday 1 October 2012

Press Review #15

By Julien Gabel on Monday 1 October 2012, 09:30 - Solaris

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

Pre-rentrée Oracle Open World 2012 : à vos agendas

A maintenant moins d'un mois de l’événement majeur d'Oracle, qui se tient comme chaque année à San Francisco, fin septembre, début octobre, les spéculations vont bon train sur les annonces qui vont y être dévoilées... Et sans lever le voile, je vous engage à prendre connaissance des sujets des "Key Notes" qui seront tenues par Larry Ellison, Mark Hurd, Thomas Kurian (responsable des développements logiciels) et John Fowler (responsable des développements systèmes) afin de vous donner un avant goût.

UPDATED: Volume Group Missing After AIX Migration

A customer did a migration from AIX 5.3 to 6.1 and then called me to report a strange set of symptoms. Some file systems didn't mount following a reboot. When the file systems in the volume group (let's call it datavg) went to mount, they returned the error that there was no such device. If the customer ran an exportvg and an importvg, all the datavg file systems became available. But then another reboot was done and the datavg file systems didn't mount.

Oracle Optimized Solution for Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure — Implementation Guide for SPARC

This white paper describes the implementation details for an Oracle Solaris Could build around SPARC T4 and ZFS SA, with all the latest development of Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c. It covers both Zones (Branded, S10, S11), and LDOMs (OVM for SPARC) directly managed through Ops Center.

Systems Director - What Licences should I have?

I have long thought it is rather silly that IBM Systems Director can't give you a list the licenses that you should have! It does, after all, know what machines it is controlling and the data is in the database. Perhaps, that will come in the future. What can we do in the short term?

Oracle SPARC SuperCluster and US DoD Security guidelines

I've worked in the past to help our government customers understand how best to secure Solaris. For my customer base that means complying with Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). I recently worked with a team to apply both the Solaris and Oracle 11gR2 database STIGs to a SPARC SuperCluster. The results have been published in an Oracle White paper.

Best Practices - Dynamic Reconfiguration

This post is one of a series of "best practices" notes for Oracle VM Server for SPARC (formerly named Logical Domains)

Oracle VM Server for SPARC supports Dynamic Reconfiguration (DR), making it possible to add or remove resources to or from a domain (virtual machine) while it is running. This is extremely useful because resources can be shifted to or from virtual machines in response to load conditions without having to reboot or interrupt running applications. For example, if an application requires more CPU capacity, you can add CPUs to improve performance, and remove them when they are no longer needed. You can use even use Dynamic Resource Management (DRM) policies that automatically add and remove CPUs to domains based on load.

Secure Deployment of Oracle VM Server for SPARC - updated

Quite a while ago, I published a paper with recommendations for a secure deployment of LDoms. Many things happend in the mean time, and an update to that paper was due. [...] In a very short few words: With the success especially of the T4-4, many deployments make use of the hardware partitioning capabilities of that platform, assigning full PCIe root complexes to domains, mimicking dynamic system domains if you will.

Get Unique Access to SPARC Product Strategy and Best Practices at Oracle OpenWorld 2012

Product strategy, real-world best practices, and customer panels devoted to Oracle’s SPARC servers and related technology are among the highlights of the upcoming Oracle OpenWorld 2012, taking place from September 30 to October 4 in San Francisco.

The first Oracle Solaris 11 book is now available

The first Oracle Solaris 11 book is now available: "Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration - The Complete Reference", by Michael Jang, Harry Foxwell, Christine Tran, and Alan Formy-Duval.

Introducing Oracle System Assistant

One of the challenges with today's servers is getting the server up and running and understanding what all of the steps are once you plug the server in for the first time. So many different pieces come into play: installing drivers, updating firmware, configuring RAID, and provisioning the operating system. All of these steps must be done before you can even start using the server.

ZFS Articles @nexenta

This category contains articles that describe the various aspects of ZFS, the Zettabyte file system. ZFS was originally developed by Sun Microsystems, and open sourced thru the OpenSolaris project, and now maintained at Illumos.org.

DTrace Guide @illumos

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for the illumos™ Operating System. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs. The illumos Dynamic Tracing Guide describes how to use DTrace to observe, debug, and tune system behavior. This book also includes a complete reference for bundled DTrace observability tools and the D programming language.

By 2015, engineered systems would account for over 30% of physical hardware shipments

Upbeat over Exalogic's global uptake, Andrew Lau, Senior Director, Oracle Exalogic - Asia Pacific, discussed the organization’s strategy to leverage the acquired hardware expertise and extend the Exa family.

Le Sparc64 X : prochain moteur des serveurs d'entreprises d'Oracle ?

A Hot Chips, Fujitsu a dévoilé les spécification de sa puce Sparc64 X, une puce aux performances détonnantes qui pourrait bien être le fameux processeur M4 mentionné par Oracle dans ses roadmap. Un processeur censé motoriser une nouvelle ligne de serveurs Unix haut de gamme à la fin 2012...

Oracle hurls Sparc T5 gladiators into big-iron arena

Oracle's Sparc processor server biz may be bleeding revenue, but the company is still working on very innovative chips. Its Sparc T series, and the Sparc T5 systems that will launch later this year (very likely at the OpenWorld trade show at the end of September) suggest the company is growing its multithreaded processors in terms of cores and sockets and pushing up into the big iron space.

Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2 narrows gap with VMware, Parallels

Many people feared that Oracle would kill off VirtualBox after it acquired Sun Microsystems, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it's been a little over a year since the last major release was announced, and Oracle is once again pushing the virtual ball forward with a major release of Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2.

VirtualBox Finds the Meaning of Open Source Life with Version 4.2

Oracle over the last two years has expanded VirtualBox to make it the easiest solution for anyone on Linux, Window, Mac or Solaris to get a baseline level of guest operating system virtualization up and running quickly.

What's New in Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2?

A year is a long time in the IT industry. Since the last VirtualBox feature release, which was a little over a year ago, we've seen:

  • new releases of cool new operating systems, such as Windows 8, ChromeOS, and Mountain Lion;
  • we've seen a myriad of new Linux releases from big Enterprise class distributions like Oracle 6.3 and Solaris 11, to accessible desktop distros like Ubuntu 12.04 and Fedora 17;
  • and we've also seen the spec of a typical PC or laptop double in power.

All of these events have influenced our new VirtualBox version which we're releasing today. Here's how...

So You Want To Build a SPARC Cloud

Did you ever wish you could get the industrial strength power of UNIX/RISC with the flexibility of cloud computing? Well, now you can! With recent advances from Oracle it's possible to build an incredibly high-performance, flexible, available virtualized infrastructure based on Solaris and SPARC. Here's the recipe!

POWER Double Stuff vs SPARC Critical-Thread

Computing processor models differ in architecture from one company to another, each trying to gain an edge in the market over their competitors. Often, chip foundries will attempt radical approaches to conquer a problem, but incremental improvement will often bring radical ideas back to similar conclusions in the end. A comparison between SPARC and POWER architectures is no different.

Oracle forces wesunsolve to close

In another blow against the community and the people who work with or/and have interest in their products Oracle now has forced wesunsolve.net to close.

Current SPARC Architectures

If an application targets a recent architecture, then the compiler gets to play with all the instructions that the new architecture provides. The downside is that the application won't work on older processors that don't have the new instructions. So for developer's there is a trade-off between performance and portability.

A Return to Linux on the Workstation

Up until about 30 days ago my primary workstation ran some variety of Solaris for nearly 10 years, starting with Solaris 9 when X86 became viable on X86, then OpenSolaris and the various Solaris Express releases and finally Solaris 11 Beta. It was one month ago today that I finally re-installed it with Ubuntu, returning me to Linux officially.

Friday 31 August 2012

Press Review #14

By Julien Gabel on Friday 31 August 2012, 14:22 - Solaris

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

SPARC Servers: An Effective Choice for Efficiency in the Datacenter

Agility can also be added to their IT operations through more rapid application rollout and an easy means to move services around in a highly available, secure, and scalable environment. A new generation of SPARC servers, based on SPARC T-Series processors, provides a wider portfolio of hardware and software features that can be leveraged to dramatically improve efficiency and agility.

Migrate to Oracle’s SPARC Systems

Keeping up with changing market conditions can be a challenge. Enterprises are looking for ways to cut costs and streamline their business operations. So when it's time to migrate off your aging servers, consider how Oracle's SPARC systems, software, and solutions can protect your legacy application investment, improve IT efficiency and services.

It's good when it goes wrong and I am on holiday (nmon question peaks)

I have never really understood why I get peaks and troughs in nmon questions and urgent situations but July seems to be a peak and fortunately I was not at work for a large part of it. Performance and nmon Questions trend to come in three flavours: really dumb, genuine and mega-urgent critical lets blame the hardware. Let me give you a flavour of each type of question from the last month. Perhaps, reading these will let you avoid the same problem or at least let you learn "you are not alone".

Enabling 2 GB Large Pages on Solaris 10

Giri Mandalika wrote an article how to use the 2 gigabyte page size offered by T4 systems on Solaris 10: "Enabling 2 GB Large Pages on Solaris 10". This can be really useful if you have an application allocating really large amounts of memory. The more memory a single page covers, the smaller the the translation tables from virtual to physical memory gets, the higher the hit rate of the translation lookaside buffer. However check out your application if it behaves well with such large pages.

CIS Solaris 11 Benchmark v1.0.0

This document is intended to address the recommended security settings for the Solaris 11 operating system (Solaris 11 OS) running on x86 or SPARC platforms.

Coming from RHEL to Oracle Solaris? Need help?

With Oracle Solaris 11 development, one of the primary goals was to greatly modernize the operating system and make it easier to use, remove some of the uneccessary differences between the two operating systems, and remove some of the frustrations that people have had. I believe we've done exactly that with the introduction of Oracle Solaris ZFS as the default root file system, the Image Packaging System (IPS) and much more familiar installation experiences with the LiveCD and interactive text installer. It's now even easier to approach Oracle Solaris, install it into a virtual machine and give it a spin!

Best Practices for Securely Deploying the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4

Oracle's SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is a high performance, multipurpose engineered system designed, tested, and integrated to run a wide array of enterprise applications. It is well suited to many different tasks including database and application consolidation, running multitier enterprise applications, and multitenant application delivery. To realize secure architectures such as these, the SPARC SuperCluster platform offers a level of security synergy not often found in today's IT architectures. Its engineering innovation and high degree of integration provide a security potential that is truly greater than the sum of its individual components.

Oracle Solaris 11 Developer Webinar Series

Who should attend? Application developers and administrators who want to learn how they can deploy Oracle Solaris 11 in their application environment.

Introducing the Basics of Service Management Facility (SMF) on Oracle Solaris 11

The Service Management Facility (SMF), first introduced in Oracle Solaris 10, is a feature of the operating system for managing system and application services, replacing the legacy init scripting start-up mechanism common to prior releases of Oracle Solaris and other UNIX operating systems. SMF improves the availability of a system by ensuring that essential system and application services run continuously even in the event of hardware or software failures. SMF is one of the components of the wider Oracle Solaris Predictive Self Healing capability.

Advanced Administration with the Service Management Facility (SMF) on Oracle Solaris 11

This article covers some more-advanced administrative tasks with SMF, including an introduction to service manifests, understanding layering within the SMF configuration repository, and how best to apply configuration to a system. To learn more about SMF, check out a variety of content at the SMF technology page on Oracle Technology Network.

Are you entitled to the latest AIX 5.3 Service Pack?

There are a lot of organisations out there that are still running AIX 5.3. As you must know, AIX 5.3 is out of support. That doesn't stop you updating to the latest Technology Level (TL 12). But you may not be entitled to the latest Service Pack (SP 6). If you're staying with AIX 5.3, then you have a choice of being supported; unsupported (but legal), or unsupported and illegal!

How I Use the Advanced Capabilities of Btrfs

This article continues an exploration of Btrfs, looking into the more interesting—and sometimes less obvious—features of Btrfs, such as redundant configurations, data integrity options, compression, snapshots, and performance enhancements.

nmon Analyser Version 3.4 = Just Released, Get Your Copy Today

Stephen Atkins (the Guru behind the nmon Analyser) has released a new version - two days ago. This includes loads of improvements and some new features. Best of all - less problems running on newer Excel releases (it works around inconsistencies with the Microsoft API).

How to Create Oracle Solaris 11 Zones with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center

Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c manages Oracle hardware, virtualization technologies, and operating systems that are deployed in traditional, virtualized, and cloud environments. This article describes how you can use it to create and configure Oracle Solaris 11 zones.

Upcoming SPARC CPUs

The upcoming Hot Chips symposiums "Big iron" session will feature two future SPARC processors...

The Role of Oracle VM Server for SPARC In a Virtualization Strategy

Overview of hardware and software virtualization basics, and the role that Oracle VM Server for SPARC plays in a virtualization strategy.

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