Articles of Interest: 06-04-2012

An interesting set of articles tracing progress in ZFS, Solaris, and other OpenSolaris based distributions.

• Larry Wake posted a note for people wishing to quickly find articles on the Oracle blog site about Oracle technologies. Articles tagged as Solaris, ZFS, IPS, DTrace, Zones, Studio, Cluster.


• Chris Mellor from The Register wrote an article about a new ZFS storage appliance Zebi by Tegile.


• The Art of Virtualization has a recent article regarding P2V (Physical to Virtual) Solaris migration.


• Henkis of the SPARCv9 blog discusses the Illumian distribution release, based upon Illumos.


• Wim Coekaert posted a short article titled "The case for Oracle VM", which discusses the pricing for Oracle VM without Oracle hardware support, as well as detailing how Oracle VM is free with Oracle Hardware Support.


• ZFS comes of age, with Open Source community adding features not bundled by Oracle. Async Destroy of filesystems is being implemented under Delphix with Feature Flags, to enable multiple ZFS development communities to add features without stepping upon one another.


• Async Destroy being integrated into Illumos by Delphix Chris Siden.


• Feature Flag being integrated into Illumos by Delphix Chris Siden.


• Chris Siden from Delphix discussed "ZTest" - a ZFS backwards-compatibility testing suite in early 2012.

Oracle Solaris 11: Session 2: Extreme Engineering - A Technical Update

Online Forum
Oracle Solaris 11:
What's New Since the Launch
April 2012

Abstract:
Oracle released a series of 4 sessions on Oracle Solaris 11: What's New Since the Launch (see Session 1.) After an overview, two Senior Principal Product Engineers for Oracle Solaris discussed a loose description of what Solaris 11 includes and what Solaris 11 Update 1 will include.

• Faster IPS Packaging
• New VM API for Java for faster performance with NUMA (non-uniform memory access) systems
• Better support for FibreChannel and iSCSI in Zones
• Infiniband and Zone integration
• Integration of Zones under Exadata
• IP over InfiniBand for TCP/IP and Zones
• Virtual NIC Migration in Zones

The presentation by  Dan Price and Bart Smaalders follows:

 
Session II - Oracle Solaris 11: Extreme Engineering - A Technical Update
Dan Price and Bart Smaalders, Senior Principal Product Engineers from Oracle Solaris Engineering discuss Extreme Engineering, from a technical perspective.


Install, Patching, Packaging
- automated all major system administration work



Image Packaging System
- Customers would have different patch methodology
- Network software repository
- Cryptographically verified (secure)
- New comprehensive toolset
- Easy to pilot and automate
- Best practices is now default way

Image Packaging System
- fallback to a patch is merely a reboot


Software Lifecycle Management
- Safe Updates, Fast Reboots
- Support Repository Unit
- Once a month heavily tested patch groups
- Patch testing with all Oracle applications & test suites

Image Packaging System
- Integrated Enterprise-Grade Change Management
- Patching to be a lower-skilled job


Boot Environments Powered by ZFS
- no initial investment
- updates as inactive clone (no interruption)
- defer reboot to best time
- trivial to roll back
- fast reboot
- mirror protection during upgrade
- fully integrated with zones
  Solaris 10 zone integration was difficult
  Solaris 11 zone integration was simplified

Sparse zones were killed in Solaris 11
- Sparse Zones produced 2 different implementations
- Various new features were added to Zones and ZFS in order to simplify Zones in Solaris 11


Security in the Cloud
- Defense in depth
- Multi-tenancy design
- Immutable zones
- Encrypted data per tenant
- Can't compromise changed/swapped OS binaries


Built-in Virtualization
- Near-zero overhead
- Delegated Administration  (i.e. boot, reboot, no uninstall)
- Moved from shared stack to exclusive stack (i.e. vnic)
- Network Isolation, control bandwidth in each zone
- No other operating system offers the options of Solaris


Secure Data for Cloud Tenants
- Encrypted on the wire
- Encrypted on the disk
- Individual users data is encrypted with keys, unlocked on login


Oracle Solaris 11: Catching Up
- Meetings about Solaris 12 happening
- Deep integration, testing happening monthly on all Oracle products
- Support Repository Updates (SRU's) tested across all products
- SRU's being delivered on a monthly basis
- Solaris 11 update once a year with new features


Oracle Solaris: Where We're Going
- Solaris 11 Update 1 targeting end of year
- Updates contain new functionality
- Solaris update info in early October
- Oracle World will be a good place to get new info
- SRU's to contain bug fixes


VM 2.0 - Virtual Memory System for the Next Generation
- Enhance virtual memory system
- Scales to hundreds of terabytes
- No user servicable parts required for ZFS
- Update 1 will deliver some new capabilities
- New API's to be delivered in the future
- JVM's may desire additional capabilities
- Memory systems will be ready when new HW is released

IPS and Zones
- IPS is faster than previous packaging
- IPS will increase in speed in the future

Zones enhances on LUN and app data on another LUN
- Trim down number of steps for zones & data
- Automate through zones framework: provision zone on LUN and take care of all details
- Details include: connect to storage, create zfs pool on storage, provision file system, install zone on storage, know what iSCSI address, connecting iSCSI client to server is automatic
- Migrating zone from another host should be easier
- Integrating up/down stack should be easier, support more over time
- Support FiberChannel and iSCSI in Update 1
- The more the automation, the easier for implementation

Infiniband: Zones on Exadata
- Integrate Zones with Infniband
- Patch: RDFP 3 for Zones coming
- Important for Zones in Exadata
- Native Infiniband Performance for engineered systems with Zones
- IP over Infiniband for TCP/IP in Update 1
- IP over Infiniband with Zones in Update 1

Make Zones Parallel Update in IPS
- Update 1 should offer 2x performance of IPS
- Update zones in parallel in Solaris 11, like now done in Solaris 10
- Systems with 10 or 50 zones can be done in time one goes for coffee
- Very short downtime for customers on patching
- Patching happening on cloned boot environments

Integration with with Java
- Major performance improvement over Java 6
- Java 7 is out; Java 8 is in the works
- No tuning required for JVM or OS
- SPECjbb2005 from build 10 to build 138 2.2x improvement
- Optimum cryptography through Java classes for Solaris Cryptographic Framework
- Hints JVM gives to scheduler
- NUMA API's integrated into JVM (vs older SMP sytsems) for 2x performance
- Large Java development in Oracle and Sun - now merged, consolidating features
- Oracle JRocket did an incredible amount of work in Oracle apps
- Oracle JRocket features being merged into Sun HotSpot
- DTrace JRocket probes being merged into Sun HotSpot

Other Notes
- VNIC migrations

KSplice
- Solaris team meeting with KSplice Team
- Solaris team bringing KSplice technology into OS
- Reboot-less small fixes via KSplice into Solaris
- Allows customer to keep patches "up to date" with year long uptime
- Synergies existing philosophy: DTrace allows data path switching without latency or interruption


Summary
- Oracle integrates & test patches with major software, not customer
- Solaris 11, simplify & automate

Sun Developer Days for NY/NJ: 2010-Dec

Sun Developer Days for NY/NJ: 2010-Dec

Abstract
Isaac Rozenfeld from Oracle/Sun posted an agenda and materials from a 2-day tour of New York City and Bridgewater tour of Solaris Days.

Agenda
08:30 Registration & Breakfast
09:00 Welcome Back, Agenda – Isaac Rozenfeld [Audio] Focus on Financial Services - Ambreesh Khanna [Audio]
09:10 Solaris Networking Virtualization – Nicolas Droux [Audio]
10:00 Solaris Zones Update – Dan Price [Audio]
10:45 Image Packaging System – Bart Smaalders [Audio]
11:30 Platform Updates: x86 and SPARC – Sherry Moore [Audio]
12:15 Lunch, Isaac Rozenfeld's bonus session on running Solaris on top of the VirtualBox hypervisor [Audio]
01:00 Solaris Integration into Oracle – Damien Farnham [Audio]
01:45 Leaping Forward with Solaris Infiniband – David Brean [Audio]
02:30 Installation Experience Modernization – David Miner [Audio]
03:15 Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center – Mike Barrett [Audio]
04:00 Service Management Facility Architecture and Deployment – Liane Praza [Audio]
04:45 Q&A/Raffle

Executive Overview
Some of the important take-aways from a Network Management perspective.

10:00AM Solaris Zones Update by Dan Price

• Page 5 - Older Solaris 8 & Solaris 9 SPARC physical machine (p2v) can be vitualized, as well as Linux under Intel
• Page 8 - Security and Patch OS Updates can be made by merely migrating a zone containing an application from the old server to another server which had the patch applied
• Page 24 - p2v support virtualizing Solaris 8, Solaris 9 (now Solaris 10 from a Solaris 11 platform); v2v for moving a zone between physical machines
• Page 26 - Some common application support matrix where inquiries are constantly made
• Page 19 - New "zonestat" command for quickly seeing health of components across multiple zones simultaneously.

10:45AM - Image Packaging System by Bart Smaalders

• Pages 1-44 - Overview of the Solaris 11 Image Packaging System

11:30 AM - Platform Updates: x86 and SPARC by Sherry Moore

• Page 4 - New SPARC T3 Processor (16 cores) image and features
• Page 5 - I am tickled that Oracle used a SPARC diagram drawn by me (unfortunately they stretched it)
• Page 6 - Current generation systems: images and features
• 1:45PM - Leaping forward with Solaris Infiniband
• Page 16 - Infiniband usage in Solaris Virtualized Zones Diagram
• Page 30 - Important OS commands for Infiniband Fabric

2:30PM - Installation Experience Modernizations by David Miner

• Page 4 - Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 Comparisons (important: Jumpstart Replaced!)
• Page 5 - New Boot Environments based upon ZFS with "unlimited snapshots", breaking mirror with only one rollback is a thing of the past with Solaris 11
• Page 9 - New Automated Installer Diagram, to replace Jumpstart… following pages illustrate use cases!

4:00PM - Service Management Facility Architecture and Deployment

• Page 4 - Best Practices for deploying applicatons across networks
• Page 7 - Best Practices for deploying applications onto ZFS
• Page 9 - Software Support and Admin teams no longer require root or sudo with Solaris SMF for stop/start/restart
• Page 11 - Application layer firewalls bundled as a service
• Page 16 - Solaris 11 Image Packaging Sytem no longer uses scripts, but bundles into SMF
• Page 17 - Automatic Fault notifications through SMF via email & SNMP
• Page 19 - Best Practices of modern virtualized Solaris Application Deployment