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Press Review #11

May 11, 2012 | 7 minutes read
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Tags: Press

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

Step-by-step instructions for using Oracle VM 3 to set up a cluster of highly available Sun x86 servers.

How to get started creating, customizing, and configuring systems using Automated Installer in Oracle Solaris 11.

Organizations can see a 43 percent positive ROI over three years with Oracle Premier Support for Systems, Oracle’s comprehensive support program for server and storage hardware, according to a new study conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by Oracle.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c, which is now included with Oracle Premier Support on SPARC servers, allows you to accelerate mission-critical cloud deployment; unleash the power of Oracle Solaris 11, the first cloud operating system; and simplify Oracle engineered systems management.

See how Oracle’s SPARC servers and Oracle Solaris 11 operating system can provide the highest reliability, scalability, virtualization, and security, along with the greatest choice of applications.

Oracle Linux vs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Take back your weekend and say goodbye to lengthy maintenance windows for kernel updates. With Ksplice, you can install kernel updates while the system is running.

As a capacity planner, I have to be proficient in virtualization techniques and latest happening in this space. Last year I got an opportunity to work on IBM’s power systems. Being from Solaris/Linux background it was quite difficult in the beginning to grasp the terminologies as they are different from Oracle VM, Solaris logical domains. So I decided to learn it and get comfortable with it. My paper is a result of my efforts in that direction.

Don't get me wrong, ZFS is really cool. But it isn't exactly new technology, it's been around for a while now, the first implementations in 2003, included in Solaris 10 since S10 Update 2 in 2006. Everyone has heard about it being awesome, but every now and then I get the question for details: So tell me, what really makes ZFS so cool?

The Oracle Support Repository contains a number of bug fixes and critical security fixes that can be applied to existing Oracle Solaris 11 installations helping to ensure that systems run without a hitch in the data center. The Support Repository is updated on a monthly basis, and these updates are called Support Repository Updates (SRU). Unlike Oracle Solaris Update releases, which include a wide range of new operating system features, the Oracle Support Repository is available only to systems under a support contract and includes a smaller set of critical changes.

One Enterprise Linux distribution, for all of the above. We make it easy for you. Grab the code, binaries and source, use it, distribute it, build your environments with it, freely, no contracts needed. Need our help, get a support subscription. Choice, open. Virtual, physical, cloud. Not just obfuscated tar balls. No license or activation key, good consistent SLAs for releasing security updates, well tested,... Run Oracle Linux in-house in test and development environments, run it in production environments, use it for customer systems, distribute it, any or all of the above. One distribution that you can manage across all the use cases. No need to manage different versions even if they're similar, no need to make different distribution choices based on your use case and pay/not pay.

How to create an Oracle Solaris Zone cluster, install and configure Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11.2.0.2 and Oracle Real Application Clusters 11.2.0.2 in the zone cluster, and create an Oracle Solaris Cluster resource for Oracle RAC.

Whenever you use some virtual memory, there has to be some mapping from the virtual addresses to the real addresses. However to prevent the CPU to look again and again in - from CPU cycles perspective - distant memory areas, there are little caches in modern processors called translation lookaside buffer or short TLB. This TLBs are rather small, a T4 core has 128 entries. While sounding small, the TLB with such a number of entries has an astonishing high hit rate.

This multi-part article provides a step-by-step example of how a single-instance cold-failover Oracle database can be upgraded from an Oracle Solaris 10 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3 5/11 cluster to a new Oracle Solaris 11 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0 cluster. Note: There is no "in place" upgrade path (that is, no direct path using the same hardware) to Oracle Solaris 11 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0.

There was a great online forum titled: Solaris 11: What's new since the launch? last week, and it has brought quite an amount of update and information about what indeed is going on on the Solaris 11 roadmap and how Solaris interacts and extends other products. I recommend you to watch it (just register, or if you have registered, after providing the registered mailaddress you can re-watch the recorded session.). For the ones lacking the time to watch the videos, allow me to attempt a summary.

The new release delivers significant enhancements that improve workload agility and performance, maximize the availability of business-critical applications, and increase flexibility in provisioning and deployment. Oracle VM Server for SPARC takes advantage of the massive thread scale offered by SPARC T-Series servers and the Oracle Solaris operating system.

The Oracle Solaris 11 network architecture is significantly different from previous releases of Oracle Solaris. Not only has the implementation changed, but so have the names of network interfaces and the commands and methods for administering and configuring them.

These changes were introduced to bring a more consistent and integrated experience to network administration, particularly as administrators add more-complex configurations including link aggregation, bridging, load balancing, or virtual networks. In addition to the traditional fixed networking configuration, Oracle Solaris 11 introduced automatic network configuration through network profiles.

Some customers connect directly to hosted Oracle Solaris package repositories to get the latest fixes, but most customers set up a local repository due to network restrictions or the desire to control which updates their systems have access to. This article provides best practices for managing local repositories through the complete software lifecycle from development and testing to production deployment.

One of the more significant new features in Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c is the ability to install Ops Center on Oracle Solaris 11, and to deploy and manage systems running Solaris 11. The Solaris 11 capabilities are in addition to the analogous features for Solaris 10 and Linux, which can all be handled from the same Ops Center infrastructure.