Out of Sync: Maddy's Blog

I am off to Community One West today! The last couple of weeks have been hectic both on the personal and work front.  At the end of the day I am happy that great progress have been made on both fronts. 

I hope to meet lot of folks whom I've worked with in the Solaris organization in person and quite excited about it. I'll be hanging around the Open HA Cluster booth where we'll be demoing the Open source version of our Solaris Cluster product. I am planning to post photos from the event on a daily basis - but hey, no promises!

Hopefully, this time I'll get time to visit Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco - de Young - Legion of Honor. It was on the plans last year as well but unfortunately couldn't visit it. Ciao!

"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!

A new blue print on why you should deploy MySQL on Solaris Cluster is available :

Deploying MySQL Database in Solaris Cluster Environments for Increased High Availability

We are pleased to announce the availability of the latest Solaris Cluster Express (SCX)!  You can download the software here.

There are some major milestones reached in this release: It incorporates the first contribution from a community member!   And coming from a student, it is doubly delightful!!  It also provides early access to some of the new and exciting features that are being developed by the team.

What is new?

* This release is runs on SXCE build 97. The version of Sun Management Center and other shared components are upgraded to be compatible with the Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) version.

* The fencing mechanisms have been enhanced with the introduction of optional  fencing.  This provides a mechanism for the administrator to change the fencing mechanism either at global or at an individual disk level.

* This release also has a new feature called zone clusters.  This feature makes it possible to form a virtual cluster based on the zones of a cluster.  This is made possible by the introduction of a new brand of zone called "cluster".  Needless to say, most of the code is available under a CDDL license like the rest of the software.  This feature is sure to make you reconsider your views about Open HA Cluster and Solaris Cluster!  Please refer to the clzonecluster(1CL)  man page for more details.

* Use of Loopback File Driver (lofi) device for global-devices name space is introduced with this release.  A dedicated partition for the exclusive use of global-devices name space (i.e /globaldevices) is no longer the requirement.

* As usual, there are the mandatory bug fixes and you can find them from the change log.

This release is a major milestone in the Open Source journey. For the list of all the exciting projects that the community is working on, please visit Open HA Cluster community.  This release of Solaris Cluster Express (SCX) will not work on OpenSolaris binary distribution (OpenSolaris 05.08).  For  the planned move to OpenSolaris binary distribution, visit Project Colorado.