Thursday August 26, 2004

The Pump Don't Work 'Cause the Vandals Took the Handles

Whether you are trying to figure out why the pump "don't work" or you are trying to protect the pump from the iVandals out in the real world, Solaris 10 can help you deal with these and many other situations. DTrace is known as the technology which provides concise answers to arbitrary questions. It has been used within Sun and by our customers to improve the performance of the operating system and applications alike and to help find the root cause of bugs which previously were difficult, if not near impossible to find using traditional debugging techniques. It allows such analysis, safely, on production systems without requiring recompilation of the operating system or the application and without having to recreate the production environment where a problem has been observed.

Zones can help isolate application environments from one another such that even if one becomes a privileged user in one of the application environments, the damage one can cause on purpose or inadvertently is isolated to that one zone or container. The degree of isolation is such that each zone can be rebooted independently without affecting any other zones on the system or the machine as a whole (and the zones boot very quickly - for example, on a Sun Fire V60x a zone can boot in as little as eight seconds, from a halted state to login prompt.)

Finally, the Predictive Self-Healing technology can help customers maximize the availability of their computing resources, and to handle faults that may occur whether in software or in hardware. In the past, typically problems resulted in a number of messages appearing in the system log which left both customers and often service personnel scratching their heads, trying to make sense of these symptoms. Predictive Self-Healing instead observes generated error events or telemetry and once sufficient telemetry has been been obtained, diagnosis engines can generate a single fault event to agents which can respond to the diagnosed fault.

Not too long ago, a number of engineers who designed these new frameworks participated in three Sun Expert Exchanges where over a live chat system we were able to answer technical questions about these features and get valuable feedback from customers. The transcript of the DTrace exchange in which Adam and Bryan and others participated can be found here. About a month later, Andy and Dan and I participated in an exchange on Zones which not only was a great deal of fun but provided us with a lot of interesting input and we hope was helpful to both current zones users and interested parties alike. The transcript for that exchange is available here. And about a week ago, some of the architects of the Predictive Self Healing functionality participated in their own exchange and its transcript is available here.

Transcripts from other Expert Exchanges are available as well here under Archives and registration is open for a number of other planned sessions including one on ZFS (The Zettabyte Filesystem) and the many fundamental security enhancements that have been made to Solaris 10.

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Technorati Tag: Zones

( Aug 26 2004, 10:26:17 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]