Solaris 11.3 SRU 35 - The Last SRU; Solaris 11.4 Lives!

Solaris 11.3 SRU 35 - The Last SRU; Solaris 11.4 Lives!

The Solaris 11.3 SRU 35 is the final SRU for Solaris 11.3. This SRU seems to have an issue with breaking OpsCenter agents and proxies. There does not seem to be very good reason to upgrade to this SRU, since it does more damage than benefit.

Solaris 11 is officially moved GA [2018-08-25] to 11.4! Oracle released SRU 1 [2018-09-24] and SRU 2 [2018-10-16] in rapid succession. have been released, but OpsCenter is sill broken.

Solaris 11 is now on a monthly SRU train and a yearly minor release train. Each month will be a new SRU. Summer of 2019 will be Solaris 11.5

Conclusions:

The defect appears to be a problem with an OS bundled release of Java. No official release of Ops Center is planned to be released, to correct this problem. OS mitigations and interim patches for OpsCenter leave a bad taste in this author's mouth. Oracle needs to make an official release of OpsCenter or fix Java.

Virtualization: IaaS, DaaS, AaaS

Abstract:

The market is always talking about clouds, virtualization, and other buzwords. For significant enterprises, who depend on Oracle hardware, hypervisors, OS's, and Applications - this short set of resources may prove helpful.

IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service:

A very concise PDF showing basic virtualization best practices under SPARC.

A short PDF on Oracle VM virtualization for Red Hat Linux, Oracle Linux, Solaris, and Microsoft Windows on Intel.

DaaS and AaaS: Database & Applications as a Service:

Oracle VM management tools for SPARC & Intel roll up transparently into Oracle Enterprise Manager…

Oracle Enterprise Manager facilitates Best Practices in provisioning of Database RAC Clusters and Patching

Oracle Enterprise Manager allows for Application provisioning, where third-party packaged templates are available or one can create their own templates.

Integrated Cloud Monitoring: Hardware, Hypervisor, Clusters, OS, Database, Applications:

There are GUI Cluster, Host, and Application Monitoring templates for point-and-click provisioning.

Closing Thoughts:

Implementing the freely available management software from Oracle, nearly everything could be made seamlessly H-A and D-R without human intervention. With so much of our software being Oracle based, it is a no-brainer to use the cloud software we have a right-to-use when we are already paying maintenance on the products.

Virtualizing the Data Center (SPARC)

Abstract:

Data Centers are often filled with racks of servers. Deployed servers are often poorly utilized or undersized for virtualized loads, in order to mitigate license costs. Legacy servers often run older operating systems, dedicated to older servers with high operating costs. Virtualization of the data center is made ever simpler when following Best Practices on SPARC hardware leveraging freely available software such as Oracle Enterprise Ops Center.

SPARC Cloud:

The Oracle "Systems Group" collaboratively authored the guide "Best Practices for Building a Virtualized SPARC Computing Environment". Included in the Best Practices guide are uses and guidelines for:
• SPARC T4 Systems

• SPARC T4 processor configurations

• Oracle VM for SPARC hypervisor

• Solaris 8, 9, 10, 11 configurations

• Oracle Ops Center 12c for GUI control

• Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance for data reliability

• Oracle network switches for infrastructure visibility

Benefits:

Implementing the best practices facilitates a dynamic, virtualized infrastructure which supports:

• GUI-based provisioning on bare metal, VMs, and OS's
• License mitigation through resource capped VM's
• Automated HA failover with physical server failures

• Automatic/Scheduled load balancing across a cluster of VM hosts

• Cluster Analytics and Performance Management]
• Complete end-to-end Fault Management

• Patch management

Ops Center: Manage Mission Critical Apps in the Cloud

Ops Center: Manage Mission Critical Apps in the Cloud

Abstract: 
This short video demonstrates how Oracle Ops Center, included in all Oracle hardware service contracts,  manages a private cloud hosting applications.
 

Benefits of Using Ops Center

There was a brief announcement concerning the "Benefits to using Ops Center" on the Oracle Blogs today.

Ops Center 12c also adds Solaris 11 features for bare-metal OS Provisioning, based on the Solaris 11 Auto Install (AI) facility.  Ops Center configures the Solaris 11 AI in a way that shields admins from needing to write custom AI manifests or custom "first boot" packages.  Solaris 11 deployments using Ops Center follow similar profile-based patterns as for Solaris 10 or Linux, all of which can all be deployed from the same Ops Center infrastructure running on Solaris 11.

Some good news:

Solaris 11 with AI, Solaris 10 JumpStart with JET, or Linux with Kickstart or AutoYast.  All of those OS's are handled by Ops Center under the covers, based on whatever network boot capability the OS requires (PXE/DHCP, WANBOOT, or AI), and all from the same Ops Center infrastructure running on Solaris 11.

This, of course, is a welcome addition. The core question of the day is:

• Does Ops Center support other OS's besides Solaris and Linux?

With the death of Xen under Solaris, if you want to run multiple OS's (via KVM) under a solid Solaris foundation including best-in-class analytics (via DTrace) and best-in-class file system (via ZFS) with an option for a public cloud (for Joyent) - there is only one OS option: SmartOS.

Solaris 11 is dubbed "the first cloud OS". Joyent is one of the first Solaris based cloud providers, basing their implementation on a fork of OpenSolaris in conjunction with aport of  KVM. Joyent's SmartOS offers a public cloud option for private clouds built upon SmartOS KVM.

Network Management Connection
Whether Ops Center can support SmartOS on bare-metal is an outstanding question. One might expect that Ops Center would have limited or no visibility to the  KVM based virtual machines. If Oracle has any interest in not forcing commercial cloud providers to have to build competing cloud management technology, they might be well advised to add some level of support to Ops Center, so they could profit from doing next to no work.

Oracle Ops Center 11g Release 1 Update 3

Oracle Ops Center 11g Release 1 Update 3

Abstract:
Datacenters have long struggled with the lifecycle management of servers on a massive scale. Sun Microsystems addressed this concern with their N1 product line, which was later re-branded xVM with additional consolidation of hypervisor. With the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, hypervisors were broken out and Ops Center has been placed under the umbrella of Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Ops Center History:
Ops Center has a long history with features consolidated from many startups and industry players, now conslidated under Oracle.
2001-10-26 [html] Terraspring Startup
2002-09-19 [html] Pyrus acquisition announced
2002-11-02 [html] Sun acquired Pyrus for virtualization
2002-11-15 [html] Sun acquires Terraspring for heterogeneous system automation
2003-07-03 [html][html] Sun acquired CenterRun for application automation
2003-12-04 [html] Sun releases N1 Service Provisioning System
2005-05-03 [html] Sun augments N1 Provisioning System with N1 System Manager
2007-11-16 [html] First Internet Archive OpenxVM.org capture
2007-12-04 [html] Sun announces xVM Ops Center and open-sourcing to OpenxVM.org
2008-05-28 [html] Sun xVM Ops Center 1.1.1 GA
2009-01-27 [html] Sun xVM Ops Center 2.0 GA
2009-02-27 [html] Final Internet Archive OpenxVM capture
2010-01-22 [html] Oracle xVM Ops Center 2.5.0.1171 GA

Upcoming Release:
Oracle Enterprise Manager Op Center 11g Release 1 Update 3 is about to be released. The upgrade documentation is now available, packages are soon to follow.

Solaris 11: Oracle Launches Cloud OS

Solaris: Oracle Launches Cloud OS

Launch Video:
Oracle launched Solaris 11 on November 11, 2010, with real-time streaming. The replay is available.

Highlights:

Oracle President Mark Hurd opens the Solaris 11 Launch

• Connected Cloud Management
• Zero Overhead Virtualization
  This is Zones, formerly Solaris Containers.
• Cloud Scale
  True linear scalability
• 2700 Projects
• 400 innovations
• 750 customers using Solaris 11

Mark Hurd also talks about how Solaris is the #1 UNIX:

• #1 for UNIX shipments for past decade
• #1 for Oracle deployments
• Largest application portfolio breaking 11,000+
• Over 60,000 Solaris Customers

Investment protection is discussed: upgradable from T4 to T5. SPARC SuperCluster solution brings together benefits of SPARC with benefits of Exadata.

Oracle showed a quick video with various testimonials:

• Solaris customers are aggressive users of technology
  Use technology to differentiate their businesses from others
• Decrease total cost of ownership (TCO)
  Provide high performance and highly scalable engineered solutions
• Solaris scales from a single node to multiple nodes
• Multi-threaded architecture
  Run more applications and process more transactions with fewer CPU's
• ZFS is the core capability to drive use of Solaris 11
  Manages large amounts of data, mirrors across chassis
• Oracle Non-Global Zones and Oracle RAC
  74% reduction in support costs
• Compare Oracle SPARC, HP HPUX, and IBM AIX
  Competition costs 3x more than SPARC Solaris
• Scalability & Securely support dramatic growth

Oracle Executive Vice President John Fowler takes the stage

Talks about Solaris 11

• #1 UNIX, incorporate into cloud deployments, engineer to run Oracle better
• Solaris has more deployments than AIX and HPUX combined
• 11,000 certified independent software vendor applications for Solaris
• Thousands of companies produce software for Solaris
• Cloud level deployment for Solaris
• Operating Systems get better over time as they add capability and features

The opening statement:

• Optimized to run all of your applications faster
  Solaris runs Everything
  - the most critical applications
  - tier 2 or tier 3 applications

The major points:

1. Kernel Enhancements - Built for next-decade hardware
   - hundreds of cores, thousands of threads
   - tens of terabytes of memory
   - double digit gigabyte network performance
   - hundreds of improvements in Solaris
   - engineering through the stack provides best performance
   - best performance in all application tiers
   - engineered for scale
   - engineered for high performance applications
   - engineered for efficiency in running the oracle stack and other applications

1. Virtualization - Designed in virtualization at every layer
   - don't build toys, we are not a toy company
   - supported, high-service, high-availability, secure mission critical applications
   - availability designed at every level, not just a virtual machine
   
   
2. Data - at a cloud
   - SAN, NAS, share block devices, share file systems
   - common data services in the operating system
   - de-duplication, compression, encryption, flash aware storage pools
   - move storage services next to application




3. Security - Engineered Security at Every Layer of System
   - Defense in depth
   - Multi-tenancy in design
   - delegated administration
   - robust auditing
   - immutable zones
   - network & data layer protection
   - encrypted data per-tenant
   
   
   
   
4. Life Cycle Management - Cloud Deployment
   - Cloud repository for packages and patches
   - Local repositories, key validated & encrypted
   - patch updates in the orders of minutes instead of hours
   - fast reboots of zones
   - cloned zones with rollback options
   - proven Oracle VM templates for Oracle run time applications
   - incorporate own software applications into repositories
   - rapid and safe deployment and rollback

Steve Wilson of Vice President of Engineering, Systems

1. Management Story - Hardware, OS, and Application
   - Solaris 11 host self-service cloud environment
   - Connect to cloud services at oracle
   - Ability to manage Oracle applications
   
2. Solaris 11 Enterprise Manager Ops Center
   - Dashboard for self-service cloud on Solaris 11
   
   - Visibility of clouds, storage, servers, switches, networks, disks, volumes
   
   - Visibility of users, quotas, usage
   
   - Visibility to capacity issues, impending failures, security patches
   
   - Automatic service request creation at Oracle
   - Ability to apply patches to thousands of servers at once, according to policy
   - OS Level Analytics
   
3. Oracle Enterprise Cloud Control Integration
   - Ops Center Drill-Down
   
   - Review Analytics correlated to Oracle Application issue
   
   - Update operating system characteristics (i.e. network flow)

Oracle Executive Vice President John Fowler takes the stage for Solaris SPARC updates

• SPARC and Solaris 5 Year Roadmap
  - nearly half-complete
  - all on-time
  - some future products in labs today
  - will continue the drum beat of products
• Binary Compatibility
• Investment Protection
• No forced migration from Solaris 10 to Solaris 11
• Constant output of activity
• Classic Microprocessor Investment in SPARC
• Adding Enterprise Application Acceleration
  - De-Compression added for Oracle RDBMS
  - Acceleration for RAC clustering
  - Native support for underlying data formats
• Solaris 12 will eventually come

Mark Hurd & John Fowler - Questions and Answers session

• Mark - Strategy for supporting Solaris 11 on SPARC and x86
  Will support both!
  Solaris moved to x86 to embrace blade market, other UNIX platforms did not
• John - Will new updates have to wait until Solaris 12?
  No, we provide stability for the customer, new capabilities will arrive in Solaris 11 Update 1
• Mark - What is the most important reason to move from IBM to Oracle?
  Speed, Performance, TCO, Supportability, ISV availability, x86 availability, scalability, cloud connectability, steady stream of announcements, performance telemetry, commitment to product set
• John - How long will Oracle support Solaris 10
  Solaris 1o update coming for T5 & M4, then a 10 year extended support
• John - Oracle [RDBMS] is moving to 12c, when will Solaris be called 12c?
  Larry runs naming. Oracle RDBMS 12c will be rock-solid on Solaris
• John - How secure is data in the cloud?
  Most people are not encrypting data in the cloud.
  Hardware does encryption at line-speed and wire-speed on the file system, network, and even in Oracle table space with virtually no impact. Oracle offers what no other provider does.
• John - De-duplication is a huge improvement potential. How huge?
  This is huge, copies are made for data protection and archive, with huge numbers of copies. ZFS at the OS offers dedup and compression. Only OS which includes dedup built in.
• John - Many customers are running Java, what makes Solaris good to run Java?
  Significant effort into: scheduler, memory manager, networking stack, compiler, observability into JVM, analytic tools
• John - Policy question: solaris images on Amazon Elastic Cloud?
  Available on OTN for customers, today. Only an hour into launch!
• John - Biggest question today.
  Life Cycle Management - Cloud accelerates this requirement. Cloud amplifies it, takes away SLA.
  Security - substantial technology