Solaris

More interesting articles were published in the wake of the 2010.Q2 release of the S7000 software.
Roch Bourbonnais published an interesting article about the performance aspects of deduplication. In passing he explains many details of deduplication. A must read.

Another blog entry written by David Lutz highlights changes to the 2010.Q2 to improve OLTP performance:

As mentioned already, the end result of these changes and other enhancements in the new software update were a 50% improvement in average OLTP throughput for this workload, and a 70% reduction in variability from run to run. Roch also reports a 200% improvement on MS Exchange performance, and others have reported substantial improvements in performance consistency on iSCSI luns.

The new firmware for the Sun Storage 7000 is available for download. The Fishworks team announced this last night in a blog entry. You can download the new software at the download denter. Release notes are available in the FishWorks wiki.

Bryan Cantrill wrote an interesting article regarding the history of this release. Paul Monday wrote in his blog about the new Microsoft VSS provider, Eric Schrock about the multiple pools feature. Dave Pacheco gives some insight into the new replication framework.

The COMSTAR target is in OpenSolaris for several versions. So a PSARC case was introduced to remove the userland implementation of iSCSI in Opensolaris. Today the change found it's way into the codebase. There is just one thing that i don't like about it: There is no shareiscsi=on anymore, as the new administrative model doesn't really fit into such an option. But otherwise the new implementation is much better and versatile.

Build 134 of OpenSolaris was made available in the repository yesterday evening for an update via the Update Manager. The ISOs for this release are available at the usual location.

Stefan Hinker presents in his blog the screenshot of a Solaris 8 system up and running for 6 years 5 months 29 days. So this system was booted the last time on Wednesday, September 10, 2003. It's a safe assumption that this system is totally downrev.

One of the annoying (but technically necessary) things with auditing in Solaris was the point that you had to reboot the system to activate it. This isn't needed any longer: It's now always activated, thus you could start to configure and use it without this reboot. The changes resulting out of the PSARC case found their way into the codebase today.

A new interesting PSARC case found it's way into the development process with "PSARC/2010/080: Brussels II addenum". It's the addenum to "PSARC/1009/306: Brussels II - ipadm and libipadm". The outcome of the Brussels II project is really interesting: It completely revises the mechanisms to add, delete an manage IP interfaces in Solaris. At the moment you use ifconfig and /etc/hostname.* files for this task. Such configuration would be done by the =ipadm= in the future. For further information you should look into design document as well in the draft of the man page.

While preparing for doing some work at a customer site next week, i stumbled over an interesting document in the document navigator on the right column in the navigator . It looks like the ak-2010.02.09.0.0 as the release notes found their way to the wikis.sun.com page. There are a lot of interesting features in this release:

• Fibre Channel target
• iSER/SRP target (yeah ... iSCSI/SCSI via Infiniband)
• Kerberized NFS
• Volume Shadow Copy Service block target provider (you need it to remote control snapshots from a Windows application for backup purposes)
• CIFS access-based enumeration (just see the files, you are able to access)
• Multi-interface iSCSI targets
• Deduplication (!!!)
• Multiple pool support
• Improved remote replication
• some Microsoft interoperability enhancements
• AD LDAP signing

However the software itself isn't downloadable at the moment for the public.

Am 23.+24. Juni findet die von Netways organisierte Open Source Datacenter Conference in Nürnberg statt. Ich werde dort einen Vortrag zum Thema Opensolaris halten. Genaueres steht noch nicht fest, aber ich werde euch informieren.

The mighty root couldn't sleep at night, so root walked around the castle. Deep down in the foundation of super users castle there was a strange room. It was filled with scrolls and some of the serving daemons of root filled this room with even more scrolls while root was standing there. So root looked in some of them: There were new ones, interesting ones. Then root took some old ones, blew away the dust and after a short look root thought "Damned ... those scrolls are so old, there aren't true anymore. Someone has to clean up this place".

So root spoke a mighty spell of infinite power and another daemon spawned from the ether: "You are the keeper of the scrolls. But don't keep everything. Just the last ones." And so it was done since the day of this sleepless night.

There were some interesting statements in the #opensolaris-meeting IRC freenode.net channel yesterday:


+[12:06] * DanR (~chatzilla@nat/sun/x-tbazbldvpztcwjjh) has joined #opensolaris-meeting
+[12:07] <DanR> So we do know a few things now, as I discussed on the OGB call a couple days ago...
+[12:07] <ptribble> (How's about that for putting Dan on the spot?)
+[12:08] <DanR> Yeah, thanks...
+[12:08] <DanR> So, here's what we can say:
+[12:09] <DanR> Oracle will continue to make OpenSolaris available as open source, and Oracle will continue to actively support and participate in the community
+[12:09] <DanR> Oracle is investing more in Solaris than Sun did prior to the acquisition, and will continue to contribute technologies to OpenSolaris, as Oracle already does for many other open source projects
+[12:11] <DanR> Oracle is committed to supporting our customers
+[12:13] <DanR> And Oracle will ensure customers running OpenSolaris have an option for support on Oracle Sun Systems where it's required, though given the very little sales here this will not be something we expect many customers to deploy going forward. Solaris is our focus, on both SPARC and x86.
+[12:14] <DanR> Oracle will also continue to deliver OpenSolaris releases, including the upcoming OpenSolaris 2010.03 release.
+[12:16] <DanR> The patch decision is aligned with how Oracle does business in other areas as well, patches are delivered for customers but not for free. So it's consistent, that doesn't define a platform future at all. x86 is the core of our Storage appliances for example, we're not going away from it at all. Though clearly we make more money on SPARC so there is more of an emphasis given the customer base.
+[12:19] <ptribble> DanR: what about open development in the future?
+[12:22] <DanR> ptribble: Oracle will continue to develop technologies in the open, as we do today. There may be some things we choose not to open source going forward, similar to how MySQL manages certain value add at the top of the stack. It's important to understand the plan now is to deliver value again out of our IP investment, while at the same time measuring that with continuing to deliver...
+[12:22] <DanR> ...OpenSolaris in the open. This will be a balancing act, one that we'll get right some times but may not always.
+[12:30] <TechJournalist> DanR: for 'regular' users and contributor to Open Solaris - do you figure that anything will change in terms of how open solaris is delivered and how developers contribute?
+[12:33] <DanR> TechJournalist: Love to see the tech journal crowd participating! And yes, regular users will find things mostly unchanged. Contributors also.
+[12:35] <ptribble> DanR: do you see any implications for the other OpenSolaris-based distros?
+[12:39] <DanR> ptribble: No, as previously once we went to the distribution model with OpenSolaris I expected they would need to find their value add area or niche and I don't think this changes that at all. They can still do want they want based on CDDL.
+[13:06] * DanR (~chatzilla@nat/sun/x-tbazbldvpztcwjjh) Quit (Quit: ChatZilla 0.9.86 [Firefox 3.5.8/20100202152834])

I think this is a good indication, that all this rumours about the end of Opensolaris are just speculation. So let's just wait for any official product announcements ...

The Phase 1 of Network Automagic (NWAM)(it's the second release, there was a phase 0.5) found its way into the Opensolaris codebase. NWAM is the automatic framework in Opensolaris to configure networking in reaction to user or hardware events. For further information you should look at the EA page for the Phase 1.

v3.co.uk published a nice review about the X4170 with really positive verdict:

A good choice for companies looking for maximum performance from a 1U package, the high specification of the Sun Fire X4170 makes it more than a match for similar dual-processor servers from market leaders HP and Dell. Build quality is impressive and, with support for the latest quad-core Xeon 5500 processors, it has performance to spare, plus plenty of headroom in terms of memory and internal storage.

I'm just asking you for a favour. Before submitting an angry comment please just read, what is really standing at the page that started all this discussiion. This will really help in the discussion.

By the way:

• This isn't anything new of the last day. We've announced that rules with the relase of 2009.06 at the CommunityOne West in June 2009 when Sun announced that you can get 5 year support for OpenSolaris.
• The end of GA support is now TBD, as isn't a new release so far and as the GA support ends with the availability of the next version, you can just define it, when it's released.