Oracle Solaris 11.2 Release

Oracle Solaris 11.2 Release Event
Oracle had released the 2nd revision to the Oracle 11 Operating System. During the release event, various people from the Oracle Team had spoken with overviews, with deep-dives for more technical information. Notes followed the deep-dive sessions.

Video Events
The individual video events are all available at a SINGLE SITE, the individual videos could not be embedded into the blog due to a bug in the way Oracle presented the EMBED video tag.

Oracle Solaris 11.2 - Engineered for the Cloud: Mark Hurd [Video] - Mark Hurd: President, Oracle

 Oracle Solaris 11.2 - Engineering for the Cloud: John Fowler [Video] - John Fowler: Executive Vice President Systems, Oracle

 Oracle Solaris 11.2 - Engineering for the Cloud: Panel  
[Video] - Customer Panel

Panel Members:

• Bryon Ackerman: VP Internet Systems, Wells Fargo
• Greg Lavender: CTO, Cloud Architecture & Infrastructure Engineering
• Citi; Krishna Tangirala: Director of Infrastructure, B&H Photo and Video

Oracle Solaris Lifecycle Management
[Video] - Eric Saxe: Senior Manager Software Development, Oracle

Key take-away point: Flash Archive to Unified Archive

1. Solaris 10 has Flash Archive while Solaris 11 has Unified Archive 
2. Unified Archive is Foundational 
3. Completely portable on same CPU architecture
4. native support for virtualization & zones (p2v, v2p, v2v, etc.) 

Use Cases for Unified Archive

1. Cloning & Golden Image from Physical Platform to LDom to Zones and back 
2. Disaster Recovery 
3. Delivering Vendor & Customer 

Applications Management Features Include:

1. OpenStack: Glance serves Unified Archive images into the cloud
2. Oracle Enterprise OpsCenter is Fully integrated and free for Premier Support 

Oracle 11.2: Virtualization and SDN
 [Video] - Markus Flierl, VP Solaris Development

Operating Platform, Comprehensive Solution

1. Full Operating System
2. Full Virtualizaation
3. Full OpenStack

Zones enhanced with Kernel Zones

1. 26% overhead for 4x Linux on VMWare
2. ~1% overhead for 4x Solaris Zones

Cost Reduction from Intel / Linux

1. 68% reduced expenditures under Intel
2. 74% reduced expenditures under SPARC

Discussion about Unified Archive

1. Encrypted Package & Delivery
2. Compliance Checks
3. Oracle Application Packaging
4. Customer Packaging

Kernel Zones

1. Benefit of Licensing
2. Live Resource Rebalancing

Software Defined Networking (SDN) Virtuzalization

1. Bundled into Solaris
2. Optimized for Fabric Hardware Offloading
3. Tunnel over Generic or Old Fabric
4. VXLAN and Distributed Virtual Switch
5. Fully Integrated into OpenStack

Application Driven SDN

1. Application can get it's own virtual network
2. Resources allocated on network via distributed virtual network
3. Priority can be provided to individual applications
4. Java 8 will make SDN fully accessible

Other Features:

1. High Availability is Fully Integrated
2. Enterprise Manager Ops Center fully integrated
3. OpenStack - Unified, Industry Cross-Platform, Zone and Kernel Zone

Oracle Solaris OpenStack
[Video] - Eric Saxe: Senior Manager Software Development, Oracle

Problems and Solutions in Datacenter

• Several Weeks to Months normally needed to deploy systems
• Cloud offers deployment acceleration from weeks to minutes
• Manage data center as a single system
• Better H-A and Data Redundancy

OpenStack

• Python Based Open Source Cloud Infrastructure
• Provides: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS
• Self-Service web-based cloud portal
• Compute infrastructure in minutes
• Provides REST API's to build programmatic expansions

OpenStack Core Services

• Horizon - Web Based Portal
• Nova - Virtual Machine lifecycle provisioning
  Install, Start, Migrate, etc
• Cynder - Manage and Provision Block Storage for VM Instances
• Neutron - Manage and Provision Networking Service, Virtual Network
• Keystone - Offers identity and authentication for users, admins, and internal services
• Swift - Provides Object Storage Service

End User and Community Support

• Joined OpenStack Foundation
• Supported in Solaris
• Capabilities to be Contributed Upstream

Solaris Contributions to OpenStack

• Solaris is trusted in Enterprise
• Solaris scales for large workloads
• Solaris offers gigabytes to terabytes of physical memory
• Solaris offers unsurpassed data integrity
• Solaris is secure by design
• Solaris offers industry leading observability and compliance
• Solaris features such as zones and kernel zones
• Solaris capabilities to include software defined networking
• Solaris OS imaging and templating technologies

Oracle Solaris: Optimized for Database, Java and Applications  
[Video] - Markus Flierl, VP Solaris Development

Optimizations for Oracle Database and Java Integrated Directly into Core Solaris 11.2

• Virtualization
• Software Defined Networking
• OpenStack

Optimizations Plan:

• Engineered Together
• Tested Together
• Certified Together
• Deployed Together
• Upgraded Together
• Managed Together
• Supported Together

Pre-optimized Bundles through Unified Archives Interesting Notes:

• Over half of SPARC SuperCluster customers are retiring non-Solaris platforms or new
• SPARC SuperCluster growth rate over 100% year over year
• Infiniband for optimal network performance
• Storage built for Oracle Database
• 26% performance gain with 4x VM's (vs Intel/RedHat/VM) 
• Dramatic increase in performance from T3 to  T4 and T5

Solaris 11.2 with Oracle 12c Enhancements

• Oracle 12c Offloading RAC locking into Solaris Kernel
  (Higher Throughput, Reduced Latency)
• 65% less $/tpm with SPARC T5-2 Solaris (vs Inte/RedHat/VM)
• Optimize Database with 32 TB SGA startup from 40 minutes to 2 minutes
• New Solaris Shared Memory interface to resize SGA with no downtime
• Software Defined Network optimized and provided to Oracle 12c
• DTrace instrumentation for I/O events in Oracle 12c
• Oracle 12c v$kernel_io_outlier

 Solaris 11.2 with Java Enhancements

• Solaris 11 Massive JVM improvement from T4, T5 / Java 7 to T5 / Java 8 over Intel
• Automatic Large Page Support
• Locking Infrastructure
• Zero Percent Virtualization
• Java Mission Control for DTrace visualization

 Future SPARC Improvements

• Database Query Acceleration
• Java Acceleration
• Application Data Protection
• Data Compression and Decompression

Unified Archive Benefit to Applications in:

• Physical Hardware
• Zones
• LDom/OracleVM
• Customer can Leverage

Oracle was first and best customer using Oracle SuperCluster

The Economics of Oracle Solaris: Lower Your Costs
[Video] - Scott Lynn: Solaris Product Management

History of SPARC Performance Leadership

• Power7+:
  10% improvement over 3 years
• Intel x86:
  20%-50% improvement each generation
• SPARC:
  Over 2x Performance Improvement each generation

Solaris and SPARC Performance Leadership

• 78% decrease in Price/Performance over M9000
• 85% decrease in software costs on large Intel dual socket
• 68% decrease in software costs/vm using Intel Solaris over RedHat and VMWare
• 74% decrease in overall cost/vm using SPARC Solaris T5/2 over RedHat and VMWare

SPARC CPU Architecture, Solaris OS, Virtualization, OpenStack - Complete.