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Press Review #12

Jun 05, 2012 | 7 minutes read
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Here is a little press review mostly around Oracle technologies and Solaris in particular, and a lot more:

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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".

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.

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?

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.

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.

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