Here is a little press review mostly around Oracle technologies and Solaris in particular, and a little lot more:
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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: "Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration - The Complete Reference", by Michael Jang, Harry Foxwell, Christine Tran, and Alan Formy-Duval.
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.
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 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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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:
All of these events have influenced our new VirtualBox version which we're releasing today. Here's how...
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.