BigAdmin Community Article: Bare-Metal Restore for Solaris 10 OS

A community-submitted article walks you through a bare-metal restore using Veritas NetBackup by Symantec and an x86 server with the Solaris 10 OS. In this scenario, a ZFS root file system was used on the original system disk.

p.s. BTW, our U.S. team will be off November 26-29 for Thanksgiving holidays. Cheers!

Posted at 08:00AM Nov 25, 2009 by CM and KP in BigAdmin  |  Comments[0]

Solaris Live Upgrade and Upgrade Planning for the Solaris 10 10/09 OS

The Solaris 10 10/09 Installation Guide on docs.sun.com shows how to save system downtime when upgrading by using Solaris Live Upgrade. This guide includes instructions for creating and upgrading an inactive boot environment as well as upgrading to a ZFS root pool.

Posted at 08:00AM Nov 23, 2009 by CM and KP in BigAdmin  |  Comments[0]

BigAdmin Overview of New Features in Solaris 10 10/09 OS

Find out about new features in the Solaris 10 10/09 release. ZFS features include ZFS flash archive, ZFS cache devices for storage pools, and ZFS user and group quotas. Patching improvements include parallel patching for containers and turbo charging svr4 packaging. (Look for "New Patching Features in the Solaris 10 10/09 Release" under "What's New In Patching?".)

Posted at 12:14PM Oct 08, 2009 by CM and KP in BigAdmin  | 

Designing Storage Solutions With High Availability for Sun Java System Messaging Server

This white paper describes a proof-of-concept large messaging server implementation based on Sun servers with CoolThreads technology running the Sun Java System Messaging Server, the Solaris Operating System, ZFS, and Sun storage arrays. (Log in, please.)

Posted at 08:00AM Oct 02, 2009 by CM and KP in BigAdmin  | 

Deploying the AMP Stack in Virtualized Environments: A Step Towards Cloud Computing

This Sun BluePrints article describes AMP deployment using the virtualization features built into the Solaris OS. Examples include ZFS to reduce virtual server deployment times and Project Crossbow technology to set up a virtual network that manages traffic for the multiple AMP stacks running on the physical system.

Posted at 08:00AM Jul 16, 2009 by CM and KP in BigAdmin  |  Comments[2]

Using Amanda Enterprise 3.0 With OpenSolaris 2008.11 OS

This paper describes how to deploy the Amanda Enterprise product from Zmanda on a Sun Fire X4500 server using ZFS. This scenario uses ZFS snapshot technology to improve overall backup performance.

Posted at 08:00AM Jun 09, 2009 by CM and KP in BigAdmin  | 

Using Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL on OpenSolaris 2008.11 OS

Zmanda Recovery Manager 3.0 for MySQL databases can be deployed on the OpenSolaris 2008.11 OS. This article by a Sun engineer shows how ZRM performs on a Sun Fire X4500 system using ZFS snapshots.

Posted at 08:00AM Jun 08, 2009 by CM and KP in BigAdmin  | 

Demystifying MySQL for Solaris Administrators (in Second Life)

Join us for Demystifying MySQL for Solaris Administrators, Tuesday, May 5th at 9-10am PDT, Sun Solaris Campus in Second Life (SLURL).

George Trujillo (Ty Valdez) and Steve Jones will offer a very detailed technical presentation designed for experienced UNIX/Linux administrators. The goal is to understand the installation, configuration, and management of MySQL on Solaris platforms. Also included are best practices for MySQL database, along with Solaris features that can leverage database management such as ZFS.

Posted at 02:50PM May 01, 2009 by CM and KP in BigAdmin  | 

OpenSolaris Bible Is Available

OpenSolaris.com has links for two chapters (see the banner on the right). These PDFs can be downloaded: Chapter 3, OpenSolaris Crash course and Chapter 8, ZFS. The book is also available from Amazon.com.

Posted at 08:00AM Mar 12, 2009 by CM and KP in BigAdmin  | 

Using ZFS and rsync to Create a Backup Solution With Versioning

This community-posted tech tip on the BigAdmin wiki describes one of the many useful things that can be done with ZFS in the Solaris 10 OS. Bernd Schemmer shows how to create a cheap disk-based backup with versioning using ZFS and rsync.

Posted at 08:00AM Mar 11, 2009 by CM and KP in BigAdmin  | 

Event: OpenSolaris Storage Summit 2009 (Feb. 23, San Francisco, Calif.)

Topics at the summit include contributing to /contrib, Crossbow and open networking, storage FMA, storage reprovisioning with COMSTAR, ZFS cache architecture, and more.

Posted at 04:41PM Feb 05, 2009 by GD in Events  | 

Using ZFS to Fight Data Rot, the Silent Killer

This community-submitted tech tip describes what data rot is, why you should fear it, and what you can do about it. Find out why the author chose the ZFS file system in the Solaris 10 OS "as opposed to Apple HFS+, Linux ext3, or Microsoft Windows NTFS" when he wanted to protect his photos of his daughter and his iTunes collection.

Posted at 08:00AM Feb 04, 2009 by CM and KP in BigAdmin  | 

Blog on New Solaris Cluster 3.2 1/09 Release

Key features in this new update release include:

- Extended Solaris Container support with Oracle RAC database
- Quorum monitoring for outage detection
- Exclusive-IP in Zones support to allow for Solaris Container isolation
- Flexible fencing
- New Configuration Checker for better diagnosibility
- Support for ZFS as root file system
- Agents for supporting the latest versions of many applications
For more information, see this blog.

Posted at 08:00AM Jan 28, 2009 by CM and KP in BigAdmin  | 

Jay Danielsen's "Solaris Tip of the Week": Zone Cloning

An earlier "Solaris Tip of the Week" provided a zone creation script that automates the installation of a set of zones, defined as a list of hostname:ipaddress pairs. This tip provides an updated script that leverages the zoneadm clone option, which can significantly shorten the install time on both UFS and ZFS root file systems.

Posted at 08:00AM Jan 23, 2009 by CM and KP in BigAdmin  | 

Upgrading to the Solaris 10 10/08 OS for SPARC Platforms and ZFS Boot

This community-submitted article was written by members of the OpenSolaris community. The authors show how to upgrade from the Solaris 10 5/08 release to Solaris 10 10/08 (for SPARC platforms) using Solaris Live Upgrade. They also explain how to manually create a ZFS root pool, copy the UFS root file system into the ZFS root pool, and activate ZFS mirroring.

Posted at 08:00AM Jan 13, 2009 by CM and KP in BigAdmin  |