Out of Sync: Maddy's Blog

You are invited to participate in the first OpenSolaris Summit for Open HA Cluster.

  Open HA Cluster Summit
  Sunday, May 31st, 2009
  San Francisco Marriott (Next to Moscone Convention Center)
  55 Fourth Street
  San Francisco, CA 94103 USA

The Open HA Cluster Summit will precede the CommunityOne West and JavaOne Conferences which start on June 1.  We will bring together members of the HA Clusters community, technologists, and users of High Availability and Business Continuity software.  Not only will experts lead interactive sessions, panel discussions and technical tracks, but there will be ample time for you to also be an active participant.

http://wikis.sun.com/display/OpenSolaris/Open+HA+Cluster+Summit+May+2009

We invite you to register yourself for this event at the above link at your earliest convenience. Email ha-cluster-summit@opensolaris.org if you have any difficulty with the registration.  Attendance is free.  There will be a reception and Community Marketplace, an informal venue to showcase your products and ideas, in the evening following the technical sessions.

"In addition, the Solaris Cluster software provides high availability of the ZFS file system to ensure high availability of user's home directory data with no downtime. "Solaris Cluster provides a superior method of high availability. Our overall availability is 99.999%. No other solution has been able to ensure us with such tremendous uptime" says McBride.

 http://www.sun.com/customers/software/embarq.xml

 http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/cluster/index.xml

 'nuff said!

The new Solaris Cluster 3.2 1/09 update adds innovative business continuity capabilities for Oracle RAC in Solaris virtual environments, enables increased high availability with new monitoring capabilities and configuration advisers, supports more types of storage solutions and provides simplified configurations.

Details:


The new features include :

* Core*

Solaris Container Cluster
Optional fencing
Quorum extensions with Software Quorum and Quorum Monitoring
New configuration checker
Optional dedicated partition for global-devices namespace
Exclusive IP in Solaris Container
IPsec on the Cluster Interconnect
ZFS as root file system

* Geographic Edition
Support for Oracle Data Guard
Support for Sun StorageTek Availability Suite with Solaris Container running applications

* Supported applications and agent features
New agent:
 - Informix IDS on Solaris 10 (SPARC and x64)
New feature
 - PostgreSQL agent support for PostgreSQL WAL shipping.
New supported application versions
 SAP 7.1
 MaxDB 7.7
 WebLogic Server 9.2, 10.0, 10.2 in Solaris Container
 SwiftAlliance Access 6.2
 SwiftAlliance Gateway 6.1
 JES MQ 4.1, 4.2
 JES Application Server (9.1UR2, Glassfish V2 UR2)
 JES Web Server (7.0u4)
 MySQL 5.1
 Apache Proxy Server (2.2.5 and version bundled with
    Solaris 10 10/08 and 5/08)
 Apache Web Server (2.2.5 and version bundled with
    Solaris 10 10/08 and 5/08)
 Agfa IMPAX 6.3
 IBM Websphere MQ v7
 Solaris 9 Container


Resources:

For additional details  http://sun.com/cluster
Download: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/cluster/get.html
Engineering blog at: http://blogs.sun.com/SC/
Documentation: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/820-4683

 The Solaris Container cluster is sure to make you rethink about the economics of HA in a virtualized environment.  For a cheat sheet, refer to my previous blog entry!

In OpenSolaris 11.08, the savecore utility is disabled by default.  Refer to the release note

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/resources/relnotes/200811/x86/#5003

So to enable it, create the /var/crash/<hostname> dir and execute "dumpadm -y".  If you don't do it, you might miss out on finding valuable info on why nodes crashed!

Beware of the sys-unconfig issue in OpenSolaris that results in system boot failure. 

 http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=4645

I couldn't see the grub menu being loaded as mentioned in the bug report.  So if you are using NIS, then go for a static binding for the first reboot.