Virtual Box and Opensolaris Developer Preview

I just got Opensolaris Developer Preview working as a guest operating system under Windows using virtualbox.

 It's fairly painless, two things I had to do:

- Change the emulated NIC to Intel e1000g. It appear that the default emulated NIC, an AMD part, is not supported by the developer preview.

-Set up DNS. For some reason DNS doesn't work by default. It seems like this issue reported for Linux.

To solve it for Solaris, I modified /etc/resolv.conf, by inputting the DNS server  I found it from ifconfig /all in Windows. There may be a better way, but this works for now.

Performance is good - I haven't done any objective measurements, but it's very responsive.

Solaris - it just works

I'm a programmer, yet these days, when I work with computers, I like to just get things done. This wasn't always true - when I was in my twenties, I loved tinkering with computers: software, sometimes even hardware. I played with some of the initial BSD and Linux kernels in the mid 90s,  tweaking driver source code for fun.  But, as I grew older, I became more interested in the task at hand.

So, it was with some procrastination that I approached getting my Ultra 20 equipped with a WiFi card.  I used to live in a small house, had the Ultra 20 on my kitchen table near the DSL. But I moved, and now I have the computer in one room, and the DSL line in another. I use a laptop most of the time, but there are times I just wanted the Ultra 20 to work.

 So I printed out the wifi compatibility list, and trudged down to HiLon, the local electronics market. I went to a bunch of vendors. I bought a Netgear WG311 version 3 card. Turns out I had to download and compile the driver, but directions were clear. Now, it just works.  I had a similar experience installing Solaris on my notebook, and old Toshiba Tecra M1 - it just worked, with the drivers on the Solaris install disks.

 I write this, because if someone working at Sun perceives a lack of compatible Solaris drivers, people outside of Sun must surely believe it's really difficult.  And, I think there was a time this was true, especially Solaris on x86.  But, the reality is, today's commodity hardware is largely supported by Solaris.  It just works.

Solaris SCSI Target

My colleagues across the aisle (and some across the ocean) released COMSTAR today. COMSTAR allows OpenSolaris to be a SCSI target.

Why is this interesting? Traditionally companies buy a dedicated RAID controller to store their data - something like this or this.  RAID controllers usually have special ASICS to compute the redundant data. The hardware boards are specially designed.  Their software is usually closed source, so it's impossible for end users to modify. The development environment varies a lot, sometimes it's a home grown operating system that's difficult to use, sometimes it's bought from different embedded OS vendors, but hard to modify.  Because the market for RAID controllers is relatively small and fragmented, the high fixed  R&D costs are not spread over much volume.

Enter COMSTAR. COMSTAR is the last link in being able to create a SCSI storage array using Solaris (actually you could do it before with iSCSI, but COMSTAR is flexible enough to support any transport).  With Solaris, you can do RAID in software doing ZFS.  CPU cycles are increasing due to multicore technology, especially relative to the speed of disks, so it's realistic to do RAID calculations in software, instead of costly dedicated ASICs.  You can attach nearly any kind of disk you want. You have a stable development environment. You can use commodity PC hardware.  You want to export some disks as NFS or CIFS, you can do that too.  And the code is free, along with a pretty good development environment.

Will we cause traditional RAID vendors to lose sales this week?  Probably not, because there are lots of things that dedicated RAID controllers can do that we still can not do. Today, there's no management story - you're left using Solaris system administration skills. The system level redundancy that high end RAID systems provide isn't there.

But for many people, COMSTAR and Solaris will provide a viable solution.  I see it as disruptive technology. Today, it fits the needs low end users. These users are comfortable administering Solaris, and assembling hardware. They understand and accept the limitations of the solutions.   But, with time, the additional requirements that higher end users require will slowly be filled by developers.