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Press Review #16

Oct 02, 2012 | 7 minutes read
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Here is a little press review mostly around Oracle technologies and Solaris in particular, and a little lot more:

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Another minor nicstat release is now available.

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

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.

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).

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.