Wednesday December 19, 2007

IEC Sports Day 2007

The one and half weeks of FUN is now over. The Sun Microsystems India Engineering Center Annual Sports Days concluded with a prize distribution this afternoon. The winners, especially the team event winners looked visibly pleased with the trophies. Obviously due to their win or run up to the finals. But the size of the trophies looked large enough to make it special for them.          The well publicized event, although announced a little late, was open for one and half day for registration. And boy, there were 550+ e-mails on the alias when I checked last, out of which 400+ were registration mails.

Agreed that many sent more than one mail as per the process, enrolling for one form of sport each, but the team game registration was a single mail per 6 to 8 member team. I must mention that cricket alone had 33 registered teams with non common members, which means we had ~200 distinct cricket players with at least 33 girls, ready to face the tennis ball darted at them from 22 yards ! 200+ for one sport alone. That was quite amazing !!!
         I was tempted to put it under the sports category in continuation to my previous post
Some of the matches proved to be mis-matches, but the enhanced rules or the format of some of the games gave us very closely contested battles in more than 80% of the cases. The amateurs were pitted against experts, but they had skewed rules to help them baffle the experts. The favorites were suddenly seen running out of ideas when the over enthusiasts started playing the games their own way, their own style. It was Fun !!
         Unfortunately, the last day was ruined by unexpected rain. Cricket semis and finals saved for the last day had to be reduced to a bowl out. Sure, there were other ways of deciding the winner when the conditions were totally unplayable. But we thought we would rather see the teams PLAY and win. Athletics and other outdoor games had to be canceled. Football really saved the day for the sports lovers. The mud and the small to mid size pools of water right in the middle of the field did not stop the finalists and the referee. The indoor games, Badminton, TT, Chess, caroms, foosball, were of course unaffected.
         Not everything went on as per the plan. There were moments of conflicts. Many of us went through frustration and disappointment. But in the end, all of us walked away with more friends and surely everyone had a lot of FUN.. !!

Saturday December 15, 2007

Solaris Containers came to the rescue

One of my friends leading a quality team responsible for performance/stress testing of a network intensive application, had something interesting to discuss with me few months back.
The application has multiple instances of a component communicating to a central server over the network. In a customer environment, this piece of the software has one instance on one OS instance. This one does a lot of snmp talk back n forth with the server. The test case was to have ~1500 instances talking to a single server at a time. His team has a simulation script that runs 50 to 100 instances on one box. He had used 15 to 30 Solaris 8 and 9 hosts some 4 yrs back to successfully test it. Amazing effort ! Because those many instances are good enough to drive the system crazy. And managing 15 to 30 such system must have been SOMEthing!
The current situation was that he had a lab with reduced resources, a smaller team and very few days to repeat it with the latest version of the same s/w. So I gave him the obvious suggestion ! Virtualize the host(s) to get the magic set of 15 to 30 os instances. And more obvious choice of virtualization technology in this case, Solaris Containers. All the team needed was multiple OS instances of the same OS flair. Within this constraint, containers are extremely lightweight. The team had a 24 vCPU 48 G RAM box that was selected to host them.
So it all looked great on the paper. One of his team members configured some 8 zones to start with and started instantiating 100 per zone. The moment the instances in just 2 of them started talking over the network, the system refused to respond to any of the terminals connected. Although there were s/w partitions in the form of zones, all were sharing a NIC.
A team meeting with a few glum faces and few 'I knew it' remarks... And here is when the exclusive IP stack support added to containers came to the rescue !!! With additional NICs on board, and an upgrade to Solaris 10 Update 4, the zones were reconfigured to have exclusive ip type. And it worked !! 30 boxes down to a single box. So easy to manage, fast boot and shutdown, nearly instantaneous replication with cloning to get 16 Containers running 100 instances each. Cool Stuff !!!