Oracle: Solaris 10 Update 11 Released!

Oracle: Solaris 10 Update 11 Released!

Abstract:
Solaris 10 was launched in 2005, with ground-breaking features like: DTrace, SMF (Services), Zones, LDom's, and later ZFS. The latest, and perhaps last, update of Solaris 10 was expected in 2012, to co-inside with an early release of the SPARC T5. In 2013, Oracle released yet another update, suggesting the T5 is close to release. The latest installment of Solaris 10 is referred to as 01/13 release, for January 2013, appears to be the final SVR4 Solaris release, with expected normal Oracle support extending to 2018. Many serious administrators will refer to this release as Solaris 10 Update 11.

(Oracle SPARC & Solaris Road Map, 2013-02-11)

What's New?
Oracle released the "Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 What's New" document, outlining some of the included features. The arrangement of the categories seems odd, in some cases, so a few were merged/re-orded below. Some of the interesting features include:



(Solaris 10 Update 11 Network File System Install Media Option)



• Installation Enhancements
  iSCSI LUN boot support
  NFS (Network File System) media support
  SVR4 Package Dependencies with Installer Preserve Option
  LU (Live Update) preserves Dump slice
  LU Pre-Flight Checker

(Solaris 10 Update 11 SVR4 Package Dependency Install Support)

• Administration Enhancements
  OCM (Oracle Configuration Manager) Client Service
  Oracle Zones Pre-Flight Checker
  SVR4 pkgdep (Package Depends) Command
  Intel x86 FMA (Fault Management Architecture) Sandy Bridge EP Enhancements
  AMD MCA (Machine Check Architecture) Support for Family 15h, 0Fh, 10h

# zfs help                                                              
The following commands are supported:                                   
allow       clone       create      destroy     diff        get         
groupspace  help        hold        holds       inherit     list        
mount       promote     receive     release     rename      rollback    
send        set         share       snapshot    unallow     unmount     
unshare     upgrade     userspace                                  

(Solaris 10 Update 10 zfs help system enhancements)

• Security Enhancements
  64 bit OpenSSL Support
  RESTRICTIVE_LOCKING now optional
  Speed Tuning/Improvements for: SSH, SCP, SFTP

# zpool help                                                            
The following commands are supported:                                   
add      attach   clear    create   destroy  detach   export   get      
help     history  import   iostat   list     offline  online   remove   
replace  scrub    set      split    status   upgrade                    
# zfs help create                                                       
usage:                                                                  
             create [-p] [-o property=value] ...                        
             create [-ps] [-b blocksize] [-o property=value] ... -V     

(Solaris 10 Update 10 zpool help system enhancements)

• ZFS File System and Storage Enhancements
  Help tiered into sub-commands for: zfs, zpool
  ZFS aclmode enhancements
  ZFS diff enhancements
  ZFS snap alias for snapshot
  Intel x86 SATA (Serial ATA) support for ATA Pass-Through Commands
  AMD x86 XOP and FMA Support
  SPARC T4 CRC32c Acceleration for iSCSI
  Xen XDF (Virtual Block Device Driver) for x86 Oracle VM

# zfs help create                                                       
usage:                                                                  
             create [-p] [-o property=value] ...                        
             create [-ps] [-b blocksize] [-o property=value] ... -V     

(Solaris 10 Update 10 zpool help create system enhancements)

• Freeware Enhancements
  Evince,  GNU Make, GNU gettext, GNU IDN (International Domain Naming), Ghostscript, gzip, Jakarta Tomcat, Lightning, rsync, Samba, Sendmail, Thunderbird, Firefox, wxWidgets
• New and Updated Device Drivers
  Broadcom BNXE (BCM57712 NetXtreme II 10 Gigabit Ethernet) Driver new support
  Intel SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) support for i350 Gigabit and x540 10 Gigabit
  Sun Blade 6000 Virtualized 40 GbE NEM (Network Express Module)
  USB 3.0 Support (Block File Throughput: 150MBps Intel/AMD; 50MBps SPARC)
• Virtualization Enhancements
  LDom / Oracle VM SPARC Memory Dynamic Reconfiguration (DR) on Migration

Competitive Pressures:
Competition makes the Operating System market healthy! Let's look at the competitive landscape.

(Illumos Logo)

Solaris USB 3.0 is in a better support position than Illumos still missing USB 3.0 today since Solaris 10, Solaris 11, and Illumos all have top-of-the-line read and write flash accelerators for hard disk storage... a USB 3.0 flash cache will provide a nice inexpensive performance boost! Slower Solaris USB 3.0 support from 2013q1 on SPARC will be shunned with Solaris ZFS SMB's considering Apple MacOSX. Apple released USB 3.0 support in 2012q4 with Fusion Drive, making OSX a strong contender. Apple may have been late to Flash when proper licensing could not be agreed between Sun/Oracle and Apple, Apple is still late with deduplication, but now Oracle and Illumos are late with USB 3.0 to combine with ZFS.

(Lustre logo, courtesy hpcwire)

Sun purchased Lustre, for ZFS integration back in 2007. NetMgmt salivated as Lustre for ZFS was on-tap back in 2009, ZFS needed cluster/replication for a long time. Redhat purchased GlusterFS in 2011 and went beta in 2012, for production quality filesystem clustering. IBM released ZFS and Luster on their own hardware & Linux OS. NetMgt noted Lustre on EMC was hitting in 2012, questioned Oracle's sluggishness, and begged for an Illumos rescue. Even Microsoft "got it" when Windows 2012 bundled: dedupe, clustering, iSCSI, SMB, and NFS. It seems Apple, Oracle, and Illumos are the last major vendors - late with native file system clustering... although Apple is not pretending to play on the Server field.

(Superspeed USB 3.0 logo, courtesy usb3-thunderbolt.com)

The lack of File System Clustering in the final update of Solaris 10 is miserable, especially after various Lustre patches made it into ZFS years ago. Perhaps Oracle is waiting for a Solaris 11 update for clustering??? The lack of focus by Illumos on clustering and USB 3.0 makes me wonder whether or not their core supporters (embedded storage and cloud provider) really understand how big of a hole they have. An embedded storage provider, should would want USB 3.0 for external disks and clustering for geographically dispersed storage  their check-list. A cloud provider should would want geographically dispersed clustering, at the least.

(KVM is bundled into Joyent SmartOS, as well as Linux)

Missing native ZFS clustering and hypervisor at Oracle is making Solaris look "long in the tooth". Xen on Oracle Linux with Xen being removed from Solaris is a poor excuse by Oracle. Joyent's SmartOS KVM integrated into Illumos helps the Solaris community move forward, but what is the use of a hypervisor without shared-nothing clustered storage, to migrate those VM's at will? Missing USB 3.0 and native ZFS clustering is putting pressure on Illumos to differentiate itself in the storage market.

Conclusions:
Oracle Solaris 10 is alive and well - GO GET Update 11!!! Some of the most important features include the enhancements to CPU architecture (is SPARC T5 silently supported, since T5 has been in-test since end of 2013?), USB 3.0, iSCSI support for root disk installations, install SVR4 package dependency support, and NFS media support. Many of these features will be welcomed by SMB's (small to medium sized businesses.)

(Bullet Train, courtesy gojapango)

The Solaris Train continues to move at Oracle, producing high quality product, SPARC support, and new drivers (i.e. USB 3.0) - if Solaris 11, Illumos, or SmartOS releases ZFS clustering, the resulting OS will be market leading.

Recent Links: 2011-05-29 until 2011-06-04

Recent Links: 2011-05-29 until 2011-06-04

Some interesting articles published related to network management platforms.

[htmlpdf] - 2011-06-03 - SPARC M8000/Oracle 11g Beats IBM POWER7 on TPC-H @1000GB Benchmark
[htmlpdf] - 2011-06-02 - Solaris installation on a SPARC T3 from a remote CDROM ISO
[htmlpdf] - 2011-03-25 - SPARC M9000/Oracle 11g Delivers World Record Single Server TPC-H @3000GB Result
[htmlpdf] - 2010-07-26 - Adding a hard drive for /export/home under ZFS
[htmlpdf] - 2010-02-01 - NFS Tuning for HPC Streaming Applications
[htmlpdf] - 2010-01-21 - Graphing Solaris Performance Stats with gnuplot

2011 April 03-09: Articles of Interest

ZFS, Flash, Database, and industry Articles of Interest


2010-09 - Oracle Database Cloning Solution Using Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliance And Oracle Data Guard

This document describes how the Oracle Data Guard feature is deployed in conjunction with the snapshot and cloning features of the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, enabling easy and efficient database cloning of a standby database. This document also includes Oracle-validated best practices and scripting to automate the database cloning operation.

2010-11 - Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification

The Storage Networking Industry Association’s (SNIA) Solid State Storage Technical Work Group (SSS TWG) has developed a very important document: The Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification (SSS PTS).

The SSS PTS sets forth a standard methodology and nomenclature for measuring the
performance of solid state storage devices. Participation in the SSS TWG came from a number of solid state storage (SSS) industry companies and stakeholders from all parts of the SSS industry, including the designers and manufacturers of SSS devices, computer systems, controller chips, test labs, and end users.

2011-04 - Oracle Database Cloning Solution Using Oracle Recovery Manager
and Sun ZFS Storage Appliance

This paper describes how to use the Oracle RMAN incrementally updated backup feature to back up a SAN-based ASM database into a Network File System (NFS) protocol-based database stored on the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance.

The snapshot and cloning features of the storage appliance are then used to duplicate or clone the Oracle RMAN backup. The cloning procedure explained in this document is performed at the production site.

2011-04-08 - Verizon iPad 2s suffer 3G blindness

Apple iPhone/iPad users had stressed the AT&T wireless backbone. Verizon is now next on the list of carriers to have their infrastructure stressed.

Last Saturday, a user with the handle of nixxon2000 began a thread on Apple's iPad discussion board saying that he or she was unable to get a 3G connection. Since that initial posting, 83 other users (and counting) have chimed in, prompting nearly 13,500 page views.

Another poster, Dambuilder, reported that after navigating up Verizon's support ladder, he or she was told that "the constant roaming indication is a bug that they presently have no solution for."

NFS, CIFS, and Zones

NFS, CIFS, and Zones

For years, users could not share NFS mounts from a Zone in Solaris. This may be about to change!

With PSARC/2010/280, there is a chance that we will see the ability to share NFS from a Zone, but I can only hope that we will be able to see overlapping shares, so we can share those same Zones shared from a Global Zone, simultaneously.

I hope we will be able to share the root zones via NFS from the global zone as well as directories separately from each individual zone. This is a great feature for hop-off servers.

Yes, the DMZ implementations do matter.

More Work With ZFS

More Work With ZFS

The Last Time...

The last time ZFS was covered, an description of overall features were covered. How to use all of those features was uncovered. This post will try to cover some of the other features.

ZFS Sharing Overview

ZFS centralizes all directory sharing into a single command structure and removes the needs to manage arcane configuration files to deal with issue such as configuration, status, and persistency.

ZFS Sharing Protocols

The new ZFS suite offers protocol sharing of iSCSI, NFS as well as SMB(CIFS). There is a catch to this: the ZFS host must support a kernel implementations of the protocols - SMB(CIFS) is only supported under more recent releases of OpenSolaris and iSCSI is only supported under the Solaris families.

ZFS Sharing Stopping and Starting

ZFS uses a property to determine whether a filesystem mount is going to be shared or not.

To stop NFS sharing of a ZFS filesystem.

servera/root$ zfs set sharenfs=off u201

To start an NFS sharing of a ZFS filesystem.

servera/root$ zfs set sharenfs=on u201

Sharing Status

On the same server, one can check the "share" command to see what is being shared from all protocols, persistent or not. A listing of domestic sharing protocols that can be checked are in a configuration file on the sharing host

servera/admin$ cat /etc/dfs/fstypes
nfs NFS Utilities
autofs AUTOFS Utilities
cachefs CACHEFS Utilities

servera/admin$ share
- /u000 anon=60001,rw=servera "" - /u201 rw ""

On a foreign server, one can check to see what is being shared (via NFS protocol), persistent or not. A listing of foreign protocols that can be checked are in a configuration file on the remote host.

serverb/admin$ cat /etc/dfs/fstypes nfs NFS Utilities autofs AUTOFS Utilities cachefs CACHEFS Utilities

serverb/admin$ dfshares servera RESOURCE SERVER ACCESS TRANSPORT servera:/cdunix servera - - servera:/u201 servera - -

For the share and dfshares command, if no protocol is specified, then the "nfs" protocol is the default. A ZFS filesystem shared over NFS can be done using the "share" and "dfshares" command.

Sharing and Persistence

In most historic POSIX systems, there is a file referred to as "sharetab" (or some derivative of it) to review the sharing of filesystems. This is effective against any underlying filesystem (i.e. UFS, VxFS, ZFS, etc.) In the example below, cdunix is not on a ZFS filesystem.

servera/admin$ cat /etc/dfs/sharetab /u000 - nfs rw /u201 - nfs rw

If one is running a pure ZFS environment, persistence is held as a property. You can see the status of the ZFS file share through a ZFS command.

servera/admin$ zfs get sharenfs u201
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
u201 sharenfs on local

Checking all shared protocols through ZFS is also possible, through parsing "all" properties option.

servera/admin$ zfs get all grep share
u201 sharenfs on default
u201 shareiscsi off default
u201 sharesmb off default

Checking the share status for all protocols from a foreign server is not as elegant. Individual protocols must be used, such as the "dfshares" command.