Tuesday January 13, 2009
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Tuesday January 13, 2009 First Munich OpenSolaris User Group Meeting
Just as announced, we yesterday had our first Munich OpenSolaris User Group (MUCOSUG) meeting at the local Sun office, which is in Heimstetten near Munich.
We organized this meeting in cooperation with the local German Unix User Group's (GUUG) (thanks, Wolfgang!) SAGE monthly meeting. Normally, about 30 people would come to such meetings, so we were especially pleased to see over 40 people come to this event.
Photos of the meeting are available here. If you took some photos of your own, then just upload them to Flickr and tag them with "MUCOSUG". Yes, this somehow sounds like a nasal medicine, but hey, it's winter anyway and most people suffer from the cold, and besides, "MUC" is the official airline code for Munich, which is why the name was chosen.
In this meeting, we discussed OpenSolaris 2008.11 and due to popular demand, we also talked about VirtualBox. We also got to tour the Sun Solution Center which showcases Sun's hard- and software.
The presentation slides for OpenSolaris 2008.11 in German are provided here in ODP and PDF format, so are the ones from VirtualBox (PDF). Feel free to use them for your own purposes in case you want to do your own local OpenSolaris 2008.11 update. Thanks to Glynn for some of the slides!
Here is also Brendan's excellent video where he shouts at some disks, for your viewing pleasure. All made possible through the magic of OpenSolaris, DTrace and the Fishworks team who brought us the Sun Storage 7000 systems:
Our next task is to find a week of the month and day of the week for a regular meeting. We'll run a poll through the mailinglist soon, so make sure to sign up by sending mail to "ug-mucosug-subscribe at opensolaris dot org" if you want to attend our next meetings.
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This entry was created on 2009-01-13 13:24:43.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
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Tuesday December 16, 2008 New OpenSolaris Munich User Group
Munich is one of the IT centers of Germany. Some would say, the IT center in Germany. Most popular IT and media companies are based here, including Sun Germany, and of course Bavaria has the reputation of being an important technology powerhouse for Germany, between Laptops and Lederhosen.
It was about time that a Munich OpenSolaris User Group be created, which Wolfgang and I just did.
So, if you love OpenSolaris and happen to be near Munich, welcome to the Munich Open Solaris User Group (MUCOSUG). Feel free to visit our project page, subscribe to the mailing list, watch our announcements or participate in our events.
As you can see above, we already have a logo. It shows a silhouette of the Frauenkirche church, which is a signature landmark of downtown Munich, with the Olympiaturm tower in the background. This is meant to symbolize the old and new features of Solaris, but let's not get too sentimental here... Let us know if you like it, or provide your own proposal for a better logo, this is not set in stone yet.
Our first meeting will be on January 12th, 2009, 7-11 PM (19:00-23:00) at the Sun Munich office near Munich, Germany. Check out some more information about this event, we're looking forward to meeting you!
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This entry was created on 2008-12-16 12:57:17.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
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Sunday October 12, 2008 BarCamp Munich 2008 - Enterprise 2.0, Open Source and the Future of Technology
I'm astonished to see that I haven't blogged for so long. Sorry to my readers, it's been some very busy times lately, and I hope I can write more in the coming weeks. I also owe an apology to the people that pointed out a bug with my ZFS replicator script and cron(1M), I'll look into it and make it my next post.
Barcamp at Sun in Munich
Yesterday, I attended Barcamp Munich 2008 which was sponsored by Sun (among other cool sponsors) and so it took place in the Sun Munich offices.
I was surprised to see that both sessions I proposed were accepted, plus one about Open Source Software at Sun that my colleague Stefan proposed with some support by me.
You can find a list of sessions for Saturday and Sunday on the web and it pays off to check back regularly, as the wiki is filling up with more and more collateral information around each track.
So, here's a roundup of session descriptions, slides and other links and materials for those of you who attended my sessions or could not attend, in chronological order.
Enterprise 2.0 - From Co-Workers to Co-Creators
This session was similar to the talk I did at Webkongress Erlangen a few months ago.
We had about 20 people in the room and quite a fruitful discussion on how to motivate employees to use new tools, how to guide employee behaviour and the challenges of opening up a company and making it more transparent.
Feel free to glance through my Enterprise 2.0 slides or read an earlier blog entry on a related subject. Also, check out Peter Reiser's blog, he has a number of great articles from behind the scenes of our SunSpace collaboration project.
Open Source Software at Sun
Stefan Schneider proposed a session about great software products that are available from Sun for free, as open source. We went through his list from least well-known to most popular.
Obviously, MySQL, StarOffice and OpenSolaris were at the end, but the more interesting software products were those that made the attendees go "Oh, I didn't know that!". One example of this category was Lightning, a rich calendar client.
Stefan recently posted his slides into the Sun Startups blog, thanks, Stefan!
The Future of Technology in 10, 20, 30 Years and More
This was a spontaneous talk that I offered after having seen the Barcamp Munich wishlist where people asked for a session on future technology developments, their effects on society and how one can cope with it.
I took some slides from a couple of earlier talks I did a while ago on similar topics and updated it for the occasion. The updated "Future of Technology" slidedeck is in German, but if enough people are interested, I can provide a translated version as well.
We started by looking at Moore's Law as an indicator of technology development. In "The Age of Spiritual Machines", Ray Kurzweil, a well-known futurist, pointed out that this law also holds for technology prior to integrated circuits, all the way down to Charles Babbage's difference engine of the 19th century.
With that in mind, we can confidently extend Moore's Law into the future, knowing that even if traditional chip technology ceases to deliver on Moore's Law, other technologies will pick up and help us achieve even higher amounts of computing power per amount of money/space/energy. Again, Kurzweil points out that if we compare the amount of computational power that one can purchase for $1000 for a given year with the complexity of all neurons of a brain and their connections to neighbouring neurons at their typical firing frequency, then the 2020s will be an interesting decade.
Key technologies of the future will be: Genetics and Biotechnology, Robotics and Nanotechnology.
We watched a fascinating video about Molecular Visualizations of DNA (here's a longer, more complete version) that made us witnesses of DNA being replicated, right before our eyes, at a molecular level. It's amazing to see how mechanical this process looks, almost like industrial robots grinding away on ribbons of DNA, cutting pieces, replicating them, then splicing them back in. In the near future, we will see personalized medicine, based on our own DNA, and optimized for our individual needs as well as novel applications of biotechnology for clean energy, new materials and the assembly of early molecular machines.
Robotics are another fascinating area of technology and we're seeing more and more robots enter our day to day life. Industrial and military robots may be an "old hat", but did you know that today, millions of households are already using robots to vacuum their floory, mow their lawns or perform other routine work? And we will see many more robots in the future, I'm sure. Meanwhile, I'm happy to say that my Roomba robot indeed saves a lot of precious time while fulfilling my natural geeky desire for cool gadgetry.
Finally, Nanotechnology will open up a new category of advanced technology that will affect all aspects of human life, the environment and the world. We watched a vision of a future nanofactory that fits onto a common desk and is capable of manufacturing an advanced laptop with 100 hours of battery life and a billion CPUs. But nanotechnology can do much more: Highly efficient solar cells, clean water, lightweight spacecrafts, nanobots that clean up your bloodstream, more advanced versions of your organs, brain implants and extensions, virtual reality that is indistinguishable from real reality and much more.
Check out the Foresight Institute's introduction to nanotechnology for more information about this fascinating topic, including a free PDF download of K. Eric Drexler's book "Engines of Creation". Real engineers will probably want to take a look at his textbook "Nanosystems Molecular Machinery Manufacturing and Computation"
One controversial topic when discussing the future is the Technological Singularity. This is the point in time, where artificial intelligence becomes powerful enough to create new technology on its own, thereby accelerating the advancement of technology without human intervention. A discussion of this topic can be found in Kurzweil's newest book "The Singularity is Near".
Another great way to think about the future is to read Stefan Pernar's sci-fi thriller "Jame5 - A Tale of Good and Evil". This book starts in the best Michael Crichton style and then becomes a deep and thoughtful discussion around the philosophy of the future, when mankind confronts the powers of strong AI. You can buy the book or just download the PDF for free. Highly recommended.
One of my favourite citations is said to be an old chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."
Many thanks to all the people that I met during, or attended my sessions at, Barcamp Munich 2008, it was a most interesting event.
Edit (Oct., 13th): Meanwhile, a few blog reactions are rolling in: Dirk wrote a nice summary on the Enterprise 2.0 session (in German) while Ralph summarized the Future technology session (German as well). I found them through Markus' Barcamp Munich 2008 session meta entry. Thanks to all! Also, Stefan has posted his slides from the open source talk, see above.
Edit (Oct. 14th): Here are some more notes from Stefan Freimark (in German). Thank you!
"BarCamp Munich 2008 - Enterprise 2.0, Open Source and the Future of Technology" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-10-12 14:14:27.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
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Wednesday August 13, 2008 ZFS Replicator Script, New Edition
About a year ago, I blogged about a useful script that handles recursive replication of ZFS snapshots across pools. It helped me migrate my pool from a messy configuration into the clean two-mirrored-pairs configuration I have now.
Meanwhile, the fine guys at the ZFS developer team introduced recursive send/receive into the ZFS command, which makes most of what the script does a simple -F flag to the zfs(1M).
Unfortunately, this new version of the ZFS command has not (yet?) been ported back to Solaris 10, so my ZFS snapshot replication script is still useful for Solaris 10 users, such as Mike Hallock from the School of Chemical Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He wrote:
Your script came very close to exactly what I needed, so I took it upon myself to make changes, and thought in the spirit of it all, to share those changes with you.
The first change he in introduced was the ability to supply a pattern (via -p) that selects some of the potentially many snapshots that one wants to replicate. He's a user of Tim Foster's excellent automatic ZFS snapshot service like myself and wanted to base his migration solely on the daily snapshots, not any other ones.
Then, Mike wanted to migrate across two different hosts on a network, so he introduced the -r option that allows the user to specify a target host. This option simply pipes the replication data stream through ssh at the right places, making ZFS filesystem migration across any distance very easy.
The updated version including both of the new features is available as zfs-replicate_v0.7.tar.bz2. I didn't test this new version but the changes look very good to me. Still: Use at your own risk.
Thanks a lot, Mike!
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Tuesday August 12, 2008 ZFS saved my data. Right now.
As you know, I have a server at home that I use for storing all my photos, music, backups and more using the Solaris ZFS filesystem. You could say that I store my life on my server.
For storage, I use Western Digital's MyBook Essential Edition USB drives because they are the cheapest ones I could find from a well-known brand. The packaging says "Put your life on it!". How fitting.
Last week, I had a team meeting and a colleague introduced us to some performance tuning techiques. When we started playing with iostat(1M), I logged into my server to do some stress tests. That was when my server said something like this:
constant@condorito:~$ zpool status (data from other pools omitted) pool: santiago state: DEGRADED status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error. An attempt was made to correct the error. Applications are unaffected. action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'. see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-9P scrub: scrub completed after 16h28m with 0 errors on Fri Aug 8 11:19:37 2008 config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM santiago DEGRADED 0 0 0 mirror DEGRADED 0 0 0 c10t0d0 DEGRADED 0 0 135 too many errors c9t0d0 DEGRADED 0 0 20 too many errors mirror ONLINE 0 0 0 c8t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors
This tells us 3 important things:
- Two of my disks (c10t0d0 and c9t0d0) are happily giving me garbage back instead of my data. Without knowing it.
Thanks to ZFS' checksumming, we can detect this, even though the drive thinks everything is ok.
No other storage device, RAID array, NAS or file system I know of can do this. Not even the increasingly hyped (and admittedly cool-looking) Drobo [1]. - Because both drives are configured as a mirror, bad data from one device can be corrected by reading good data from the other device. This is the "applications are unaffected" and "no known data errors" part.
Again, it's the checksums that enable ZFS to distinguish good data blocks from bad ones, and therefore enabling self-healing while the system is reading stuff from disk.
As a result, even though both disks are not functioning properly, my data is still safe, because (luckily, albeit with millions of blocks per disk, statistics is on my side here) the erroneous blocks don't overlap in terms of what pieces of data they store.
Again, no other storage technology can do this. RAID arrays only kick in when the disk drives as a whole are unacessible or when a drive diagnoses itself to be broken. They do nothing against silent data corruption, which is what we see here and what all people on this planet that don't use ZFS (yet) can't see (yet). Until it's too late. - Data hygiene is a good thing. Do a "zpool scrub <poolname>" once in a while. Use cron(1M) to do this, for example every other week for all pools.
Over the weekend, I ordered myself a new disk (sheesh, they dropped EUR 5 in price already after just 5 days...) and after a "zpool replace santiago c10t0d0 c11t0d0" on monday, my pool started resilvering:
constant@condorito:~$ zpool status
(data from other pools omitted)
pool: santiago
state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error. An
attempt was made to correct the error. Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'.
see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
scrub: resilver in progress for 1h13m, 6.23% done, 18h23m to go
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
santiago DEGRADED 0 0 0
mirror DEGRADED 0 0 0
replacing DEGRADED 0 0 0
c10t0d0 DEGRADED 0 0 135 too many errors
c11t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c9t0d0 DEGRADED 0 0 20 too many errors
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
c8t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c7t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
The next step for me is to send the c10t0d0 drive back and ask for a replacement under warranty (it's only a couple of months old). After receiving c10's replacement, I'll consider sending in c9 for replacement (depending on how the next scrub goes).
Which makes me wonder: How will drive manufacturers react to a new wave of warranty cases based on drive errors that were not easily detectable before?
[1] To the guys at Drobo: Of course you're invited to implement ZFS into the next revision of your products. It's open source. In fact, Drobo and ZFS would make a perfect team!
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This entry was created on 2008-08-12 06:44:22.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
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Tuesday May 27, 2008 OpenSolaris Home Server: ZFS and USB Disks
A couple of weeks ago, OpenSolaris 2008.05, project Indiana, saw its first official release. I've been looking forward to this moment so I can upgrade my home server and work laptop and start benefiting from the many cool features. If you're running a server at home, why not use the best server OS on the planet for it?
This is the first in a small series of articles about using OpenSolaris for home server use. I did a similar series some time ago and got a lot of good and encouraging feedback, so this is an update, or a remake, or home server 2.0, if you will.
I'm not much of a PC builder, but Simon has posted his experience with selecting hardware for his home server. I'm sure you'll find good tips there. In my case, I'm still using my trusty old Sun Java W1100z workstation, running in my basement. And for storing data, I like to use USB disks.
USB disk advantages
This is the moment where people start giving me that "Yeah, right" or "Are you serious?" looks. But USB disk storage has some cool advantages:
- It's cheap. About 90 Euros for half a TB of disk from a major brand. Can't complain about that.
- It's hot-pluggable. What happens if your server breaks and you want to access your data? With USB it's as easy as unplug from broken server, plug into laptop and you're back in business. And there's no need to shut down or open your server if you just want to add a new disk or change disk configuration.
- It scales. I have 7 disks running in my basement. All I needed to do to make them work with my server was to buy a cheap 15 EUR 4-port USB card to expand my existing 5 USB ports. I still have 3 PCI slots left, so I could add 12 disks more at full USB 2.0 speed if I wanted.
- It's fast enough. I measure about 10MB/s in write performance with a typical USB disk. That's about as fast as you can get over a 100 MBit/s LAN network which most people use at home. As long as the network remains the bottleneck, USB disk performance is not the problem.
ZFS and USB: A Great Team
But this is not enough. The beauty of USB disk storage lies in its combination with ZFS. When adding some ZFS magic to the above, you also get:
- Reliability. USB disks can be mirrored or used in a RAID-Z/Z2 configuration. Each disk may be unreliable (because they're cheap) individually, but thanks to ZFS' data integrity and self-healing properties, the data will be safe and FMA will issue a warning early enough so disks can be replaced before any real harm can happen.
- Flexibility. Thanks to pooled storage, there's no need to wonder what disks to use for what and how. Just build up a single pool with the disks you have, then assign filesystems to individual users, jobs, applications, etc. on an as-needed basis.
- Performance. Suppose you upgrade your home network to Gigabit Ethernet. No need to worry: The more disks you add to the pool, the better your performance will be. Even if the disks are cheap.
Together, USB disks and ZFS make a great team. Not enterprise class, but certainly an interesting option for a home server.
ZFS & USB Tips & Tricks
So here's a list of tips, tricks and hints you may want to consider when daring to use USB disks with OpenSolaris as a home server:
- Mirroring vs. RAID-Z/Z2: RAID-Z (or its more reliable cousin RAID-Z2) is tempting: You get more space for less money. In fact, my earlier versions of zpools at home were a combination of RAID-Z'ed leftover slices with the goal to squeeze as much space as possible at some reliability level out of my mixed disk collection.
But say you have a 3+1 RAID-Z and want to add some more space. Would you buy 4 disks at once? Isn't that a bit big, granularity-wise?
That's why I decided to keep it simple and just mirror. USB disks are cheap enough, no need to be even more cheap. My current zpool has a pair of 1 TB USB disks and a pair of 512 GB USB disks and works fine.
Another advantage of this aproach is that you can organically modernize your pool: Wait until one of your disks starts showing some flakyness (FMA and ZFS will warn you as soon as the first broken data block has been repaired). Then replace the disk with a bigger one, then its mirror with the same, bigger size. That will give you more space without the complexity of too many disks and keep them young enough to not be a serious threat to your data. Use the replaced disks for scratch space or less important tasks. - Instant replacement disk: A few weeks ago, one of my mirrored disks showed its first write error. It was a pair of 320GB disks, so I ordered a 512GB replacement (with the plan to order the second one later). But now, my mirror may be vulnerable: What if the second disk starts breaking before the replacement has arrived?
That's why having a few old but functional disks around can be very valuable: In my case, took a 200GB and a 160GB disk and combined them into their own zpool:Then, I created a new ZVOL sitting on the new pool:zpool create temppool c11t0d0 c12t0d0
zfs create -sV 320g temppool/tempvol
Here's out temporary replacement disk! I then attached it to my vulnerable mirror:zfs attach santiago c10t0d0 /dev/zvol/dsk/temppool/tempvol
And voilá, my precious production pool stated resilvering the new virtual disk. After the new disk arrived and has been resilvered, the temporary disk can be detached, destroyed and its space put to some other good use.
Storage virtualization has never been so easy! - Don't forget to scrub: Especially with cheap USB disks, regular scrubbing is important. Scrubbing will check each and every block of your data on disk and make sure it's still valid. If not, it will repair it (since we're mirroring or using RAID-Z/Z2) and tell you what disk had a broken block so you can decide whether it needs to be replaced or not just yet.
How often you want to or should scrub depends on how much you trust your hardware and how much your data is being read out anyway (any data that is read out is automatically checked, so that particular portion of the data is already "scrubbed" if you will). I find scrubbing once every two weeks a useful cycle, othery may prefer once a month or once a week.
But scrubbing is a process that needs to be initiated by the administrator. It doesn't happen by itself, so it is important that you think of issuing the "zpool scrub" command regularly, or better, set up a cronjob for it to happen automatically.
As an example, the following line:23 01 1,15 * * for i in `zpool list -H -o name`; do zpool scrub $i; done
in your crontab will start a scrub for each of your zpools twice a month on the 1st and the 15th at 01:23 AM. - Snapshot often: Snapshots are cheap, but they can save the world if you accientally deleted that important file. Same rule as with scrubbing: Do it. Often enough. Automatically. Tim Foster did a great job of implementing an automatic ZFS snapshot service, so why don't you just install it now and set up a few snapshot schemes for your favourite ZFS filesystems?
The home directories on my home server are snapshotted once a month (and all snapshots are kept), once a week (keeping 52 snapshots) and once a day (keeping 31 snapshots). This gives me a time-machine with daily, weekly and monthly granularities depending on how far back in time I want to travel through my snapshots.
So, USB disks aren't bad. In fact, thanks to ZFS, USB disks can be very useful building blocks for your own little cost-effective but reliable and integrity-checked data center.
Let me know what experiences you made while using USB storage at home, or with ZFS and what tips and tricks you have found to work well for you. Just enter a comment below or send me email!
"OpenSolaris Home Server: ZFS and USB Disks" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-05-27 13:40:54.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
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Sunday March 30, 2008 How to install the TwonkyMedia UPnP server on Solaris
In my last post, I compiled an installed the MediaTomb UPnP server on Solaris in order to stream movies, photos and music to my PS3 and it worked well. But I wasn't quite satisfied with it's features: No support for tags/covers in AAC encoded music (>95% of my music library is encoded in the superior AAC format) and a few other quirks here and there. So I decided to try the TwonkyVision TwonkyMedia server.
Unfortunately, the guys at TwonkyMedia (now PacketVideo) don't support their TwonkyVision server on Solaris (yet?). Only Linux, Windows and MacOS X are supported. The absence of answers to a Solaris request post in their forum isn't very encouraging. TwonkyMedia is closed source and only commercially available (EUR 29.95) which means you can't even compile it yourself on Solaris. At least there's a trial period of 30 days. Does this mean no ZFS and other Solaris goodness to TwonkyMedia?
Fear not, this is exactly what Branded Zones in Solaris 10/OpenSolaris are all about! They allow you to install a Linux distribution inside a Solaris 10 Container. The BrandZ framework then seamlessly translates Linux systemcalls into Solaris systemcalls. The result: All the goodness of Solaris, such as ZFS, FMA, DTrace and whatnot, even for closed source or otherwise problematic Linux applications. So, here's how to run the TwonkyMedia server on a Solaris x64/x86 machine (sorry, no SPARC, different CPU architecture):
- Set up a standard lx branded Zone. Here's a short and sweet tutorial on how to do it. In my case, I used ZFS for the zone root path. This gives me compression and the ability to snapshot the Linux root filesystem whenever I like.
- I used the CentOS tarball from the BrandZ download area to install a standard CentOS zone. Quick, easy, free, works well for most cases.
- After having installed the CentOS Linux branded Zone and before the first boot, it is a good idea to make a ZFS snapshot of the root filesystem, just in case. You can later use the snapshot to revert the zone to it's freshly installed state or to easily clone more zones like this in the future.
- After the first boot of the Linux zone with zoneadm -z zonename boot, you can login to it's virtual console using zlogin -z zonename. Now, setup basic networking from inside the Linux zone by editing the /etc/sysconfig/network file. Then, you can login through ssh -X into the Linux zone and run graphical configuration tools such as redhat-config-network to configure DNS, set up users, etc.
- Now, download the TwonkyMedia server from the Linux zone by using wget http://www.twonkyvision.com/Download/4.4/twonkymedia-i386-glibc-2.2.5.zip and follow the TwonkyMedia installation guide.
- You should now have the TwonkyMedia server up and running from within a Linux branded zone on Solaris! Connect to it through your webbrowser at http://your.servers.ip.address/:9000 and configure it's various settings to your taste.
This is it, actually it's much easier than compiling MediaTomb, but it comes at the cost of having to pay after the trial period, if you like it. Above, you see a picture of TwonkyMedia, running in an lx branded zone on Solaris, streaming AAC music from my favorite Chilean band "La Ley" to a PS3. Notice the cover art and song info to the bottom left that is not available with MediaTomb today for AAC encoded music.
I'm now going to write to the TwonkyVision support department at support@twonkyvision.de and ask for a real Solaris version. After all, if they expect their customers to pay for software, they ahould at least provide a real binary. If you're interested in getting TwonkyMedia to run natively on Solaris too, join me and send emails of your own to them or post to their forums.
"How to install the TwonkyMedia UPnP server on Solaris" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
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Monday March 17, 2008 CeBIT 2008 impressions
CeBIT 2008, the largest IT trade show worldwide, is over. This must be my 9th CeBIT as a Sunnie, boy does time fly fast. Here are a few impressions from my point of view.
Thanks to Detlef, who set up an Ultra 40 M2 with a current Solaris Express and Sun xVM Server for us (here's a nice writeup (sorry, in german) on how he did it, in case you want to try out xVM yourself), buildup was done really quickly. We had two monitors attached to the machine and thanks to NVIDIA's "nvidia-settings" tool that they ship with the Solaris NVIDIA drivers, setting up Twinview was a piece of cake too.
Then we set up the Compiz window manager to run on our Solaris Ultra 40 M2. Few people know what it is (it adds some 3D eye candy to your desktop, similar to Apple's) and even fewer know that it runs on Solaris as well. Thanks to Erwann, installing Compiz is just a matter of running a script. Even if you have an ATI card, you're likely to be able to run Compiz, thanks to Minskey's preliminary driver. It runs just fine on my Acer Ferrari 4000 laptop!
But then we found out that running many virtual OSes on a machine requires quite some amount of memory. Our 8 GB inside the Ultra 40 M2 wasn't enough for the different versions of Solaris, Linux and Windows that we had installed. So we hunted down an unsuspecting little Sun Blade X6220 module and ripped it open for an extra 4 GB. To the right, you see Ulrich performing the upgrade, Systemhero-like (i.e. no anti-static mats or straps, those are for sissies...). Now there was enough air to breathe for our virtualized OSes, the booth was ready to go!
Day 1 wasn't the busiest day, as expected, but it kept us quite entertained. Mario Heide from the german POFACS podcast stopped by and we explored a few things we could do for future episodes.
High-End Visualization: There was also quite an interest from the automotive industry in trying the Sun Fire X4600 M2 8-socket Opteron Server with up to 256 GB of RAM with the NVIDIA Quadro Plex VCS external graphics cards as a really big workstation, or a network visualization server. The LRZ supercomputer center near Munich is already using such as setup to provide virtualized remote graphics power to their researchers and now the manufacturing industry is starting to like the idea. An ideal companion for this is Sun's suite of visualization software that provides both scalable and shared approaches to high-end visualization. Try it out, it's free and open source.
Optimizing AMP: Another popular question was: "How can I optimize the AMP stack on Solaris and Sun Hardware?" Each day, I pointed about a dozen customers to our Cool Stack homepage, which is part of the Cool Tools developed by Sun for the UltraSPARC T1/T2 processors. The Cool Stack is simply a set of popular web apps (you know, Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Tomcat and friends) which have been precompiled by Sun for Solaris on both x86 and SPARC architectures. Since we compile with Sun Studio compilers using the right options and integrate them with selected Solaris technologies, such as the cryptographic framework, using the Cool Stack is both easy to do and it provides great out-of-the-box performance.
All the other days were very busy. Loads of people, loads of questions lots of interest in Sun technologies, both in hardware and in software. The great thing about this particular CeBIT and the new Sun booth, now in Hall 2 was that the people who came by were all relevant to Sun. We hardly had any "bag-rats" at all, so I guess this is as good as it gets in terms of visitor quality. Visitors ranged from high-level IT executives through middle-management, system administrators, hackers, students and Sun/Solaris enthusiasts.
Sun Ray and Sun Secure Global Desktop: We also had schools looking at our Sun Ray and Sun Secure Global Desktop solutions as a flexible, secure, cost-effective and eco-friendly infrastructure for their schools. Actually, Sun Ray technologies were among the hottest topics discussed during this CeBIT at the Sun booth, not just for schools but also for any kind of environment that is sick and tired of having to upgrade Windows or Linux PCs every couple of years. Also call centers, branch offices and a couple of special applications such as kiosks are very good fits for Sun Rays.
Sun xVM was another hot topic. Having been at the Sun xVM pod with Ulrich and Detlef, we explained numerous times how the Sun xVM Server adds value to the work of the Xen community by providing Solaris technologies as the better foundation for virtual machines of all OSes. The Solaris Fault Manager can monitor your hardware and trigger virtual machine migration before the hardware starts failing for real, increasing uptime for your virtualized applications. This can work hand in hand with the Solaris Cluster, which adds high-availability features to virtualized OSes. ZFS is a great tool for providing fast, flexible, integrity-checked and powerful storage through iSCSI, NFS, CIFS or other protocols to virtualized environments. And there's much more, for example the Solaris Crossbow project which adds fully virtualized and bandwidth-managed network devices to the picture, enabling full network-in-a-box virtualization approaches. Oh, and when a virtual machine fails, you can debug it with DTrace, too. Levon has some nice examples about DTrace and Xen working together!
Sexy Hardware: No Sun booth at CeBIT without showing off some tin and this year was no exception. For starters, we had a datacenter with Sun's newest UltraSPARC T2, AMD and Intel based servers, both in rack-mount and in blade form factors. Of course we also had some storage arrays and a big tape library to show off.
But the big eyecatcher was the Sun Modular Datacenter S20 (formerly known as "Project Black Box") which was so big and so eye-catching that we had to place it outside the halls, near the Intel pavillion. Our heroic product manager Ingo explained everything about project Black Box to customers, including more than a handful of TV stations. Even at 4 o'clock in the morning, for the ARD TV station's breakfast TV show...
Back to Solaris: The nice thing about Solaris at CeBIT 2008 was that we hardly needed to explain to people that it is free and open source. Most visitors already knew this and came to visit us specifically to learn some more about a particular Solaris feature, grab a Solaris Express Developer Edition DVD or ask questions about how to best deploy Solaris in their environment. One system administrator actually thanked us for producing our CSI:Munich ZFS video because it helped him gain his boss' support for deploying ZFS in their company. The boss just said: "If this really works, then we need to roll it out now!" (Of course it "really worked"). Actually, ZFS was one of the most popular discussion topics, and I logged in to my home machine more than once to show some real life, production snapshots, pools and other ZFS features on a living, breathing system.
Getting Started with Solaris: We handed out a lot of Solaris Express: Developer Edition DVDs and to get people going and avoid the initial humps of first-time Solaris users, we pointed visitors to the same essential and useful links over and over again. This inspired me to post an entry into the german Solarium blog with the 7 Most Useful Solaris and OpenSolaris links. Now I only need to point customers to a single website for all their initial Solaris needs: The Solarium.
Helping and Learning: But we learned a lot of new stuff, too. Not only are Ulrich and Detlef great sources of endless Solaris knowledge (them being OS Ambassadors at Sun), I also had a number of very illuminating conversations with customers and visitors. Thorsten Ludewig of the Wolfenbüttel University of Applied Sciences updated me on the state of the art of digital picture frames. A guy from Konstanz University pointed me to a small company in Switzerland called "PC Engines" that manufactures small form factor systems with good quality. I'm looking for a small, low-power system as a backup server at home and this might be it. He's running NetBSD on these systems for small and home server tasks, but I wonder if they work with Solaris as well. At only 256 MB it might be a stretch but not impossible. Other options I'm considering are VIA's Artigo kit or maybe a standard Via motherboard in an ITX case after all? Let me know if you have experience with Solaris on very small, very low-power machines.
Meeting Customers and Interests: CeBIT, like any major trade show is a great way to connect with customers and interests. Sometimes it's a way of meeting people you only knew virtually. In this case, we had three fans of the Systemhelden.com podcast HELDENFunk visit us at the booth: Graefin, Chaosblog and Unruheherd. All three came in white Sun T-Shirts which could only be rewarded with new black Systemhelden.com T-Shirts :). We had a great time during the Sun booth party that day and according to Chaosblog's latest entry, they seem to have had a fun time at CeBIT a well.
In closing, this was probably one of the best CeBITs I've ever had. Customers and partners like Sun, they are excited about our technology and they want more. Some know us because of our Software and were suprised to learn that we have hardware, too (this is a good sign), some come to see our hardware and discover our software portfolio (this case is slightly more common) and all want us to win, which is a good feeling :).
Check out my CeBIT 2008 photo gallery on SmugMug for some more impressions of the Sun booth @ CeBIT with comments.
Oh, Rolf brought some beer to celebrate. Cheers!
"CeBIT 2008 impressions" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-03-17 08:35:17.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
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Monday February 25, 2008 Meet Me Next Week at CeBIT 2008
CeBIT is the world's largest IT trade show. Whenever we mention this to our colleagues in the US, they say "sure". Only when they actually come over to our booth and experience the CeBIT feeling, they realize how really big it is. Most US trade shows use a really big exhibition hall. CeBIT has 21 (twenty-one) of them. Plus the space in between. Bring some good shoes.
CeBIT 2008 will take place next week, March 4-9 in Hannover, Germany. If you go there, visit the Sun booth. We'll have systems, storage, software and service exhibits, a Blackbox, even an installation of Project Wonderland.
I'll be at the Solaris part of the booth, talking to customers about Niagara 2 and other CPU and System Technologies, Solaris, OpenSolaris and ZFS, HPC and Grid Computing, Web 2.0 and what not. If you read this blog, stop by and say hi. Let me know what you like and what you don't like about this blog, about Sun or whatever else goes through your mind. I'll bring my voice recorder and a camera and we can talk about your own cool projects in a podcast interview that we can then publish through the HELDENFunk podcast. Join the System Heroes (or the german Systemhelden) and get a T-Shirt or I'll try to organize one of those champagne VIP passes for you. Just ask for me at the info counter.
See you at CeBIT!
"Meet Me Next Week at CeBIT 2008" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-02-25 13:48:28.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
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Tuesday February 19, 2008 VirtualBox and ZFS: The Perfect Team
I've never installed Windows in my whole life. My computer history includes systems like the Dragon 32, the Commodore 128, then the Amiga, Apple PowerBook (68k and PPC) etc. plus the occasional Sun system at work. Even the laptop my company provided me with only runs Solaris Nevada, nothing else. Today, this has changed.
A while ago, Sun announced the acquisition of Innotek, the makers of the open-source virtualization software VirtualBox. After having played a bit with it for a while, I'm convinced that this is one of the coolest innovations I've seen in a long time. And I'm proud to see that this is another innovative german company that joins the Sun family, Welcome Innotek!
Here's why this is so cool.
After having upgraded my laptop to Nevada build 82, I had VirtualBox up and running in a matter of minutes. OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 (Project Indiana) runs fine on VirtualBox, so does any recent Linux (I tried Ubuntu). But Windows just makes for a much cooler VirtualBox demo, so I did it:
After 36 years of Windows freedom, I ended up installing it on my laptop, albeit on top of VirtualBox. Safer XP if you will. To the top, you see my VirtualBox running Windows XP in all its Tele-Tubby-ish glory.
As you can see, this is a plain vanilla install, I just took the liberty of installing a virus scanner on top. Well, you never know...
So far, so good. Now let's do something others can't. First of all, this virtual machine uses a .vdi disk image to provide hard disk space to Windows XP. On my system, the disk image sits on top of a ZFS filesystem:
# zfs list -r poolchen/export/vm/winxp
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
poolchen/export/vm/winxp 1.22G 37.0G 20K /export/vm/winxp
poolchen/export/vm/winxp/winxp0 1.22G 37.0G 1.05G /export/vm/winxp/winxp0
poolchen/export/vm/winxp/winxp0@200802190836_WinXPInstalled 173M - 909M -
poolchen/export/vm/winxp/winxp0@200802192038_VirusFree 0 - 1.05G -
Cool thing #1: You can do snapshots. In fact I have two snapshots here. The first is from this morning, right after the Windows XP installer went through, the second has been created just now, after installing the virus scanner. Yes, there has been some time between the two snapshots, with lots of testing, day job and the occasional rollback. But hey, that's why snapshots exist in the first place.
Cool thing #2: This is a compressed filesystem:
# zfs get all poolchen/export/vm/winxp/winxp0
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
poolchen/export/vm/winxp/winxp0 type filesystem -
poolchen/export/vm/winxp/winxp0 creation Mon Feb 18 21:31 2008 -
poolchen/export/vm/winxp/winxp0 used 1.22G -
poolchen/export/vm/winxp/winxp0 available 37.0G -
poolchen/export/vm/winxp/winxp0 referenced 1.05G -
poolchen/export/vm/winxp/winxp0 compressratio 1.53x -
...
poolchen/export/vm/winxp/winxp0 compression on inherited from poolchen
ZFS has already saved me more than half a gigabyte of precious storage capacity already!
Next, we'll try out Cool thing #3: Clones. Let's clone the virus free snapshot and try to create a second instance of Win XP from it:
# zfs clone poolchen/export/vm/winxp/winxp0@200802192038_VirusFree poolchen/export/vm/winxp/winxp1
# ls -al /export/vm/winxp
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 5 constant staff 4 Feb 19 20:42 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 constant staff 5 Feb 19 08:44 ..
drwxr-xr-x 3 constant staff 3 Feb 19 18:47 winxp0
drwxr-xr-x 3 constant staff 3 Feb 19 18:47 winxp1
dr-xr-xr-x 3 root root 3 Feb 19 08:39 .zfs
# mv /export/vm/winxp/winxp1/WindowsXP_0.vdi /export/vm/winxp/winxp1/WindowsXP_1.vdi
The clone has inherited the mountpoint from the upper level ZFS filesystem (the winxp one) and so we have everything set up for VirtualBox to create a second Win XP instance from. I just renamed the new container file for clarity. But hey, what's this?
Damn! VirtualBox didn't fall for my sneaky little clone trick. Hmm, where is this UUID stored in the first place?
# od -A d -x WindowsXP_1.vdi | more
0000000 3c3c 203c 6e69 6f6e 6574 206b 6956 7472
0000016 6175 426c 786f 4420 7369 206b 6d49 6761
0000032 2065 3e3e 0a3e 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000048 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000064 107f beda 0001 0001 0190 0000 0001 0000
0000080 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
*
0000336 0000 0000 0200 0000 f200 0000 0000 0000
0000352 0000 0000 0000 0000 0200 0000 0000 0000
0000368 0000 c000 0003 0000 0000 0010 0000 0000
0000384 3c00 0000 0628 0000 06c5 fa07 0248 4eb6
0000400 b2d3 5c84 0e3a 8d1c 8225 aae4 76b5 44f5
0000416 aa8f 6796 283f db93 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000432 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000448 0000 0000 0000 0000 0400 0000 00ff 0000
0000464 003f 0000 0200 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000480 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
*
0000512 0000 0000 ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
0000528 ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
*
0012544 0001 0000 0002 0000 0003 0000 0004 0000
Ahh, it seems to be stored at byte 392, with varying degrees of byte and word-swapping. Some further research reveals that you better leave the first part of the UUID alone (I spare you the details...), instead, the last 6 bytes: 845c3a0e1c8d, sitting at byte 402-407 look like a great candidate for an arbitrary serial number. Let's try changing them (This is a hack for demo purposes only. Don't do this in production, please):
# dd if=/dev/random of=WindowsXP_1.vdi bs=1 count=6 seek=402 conv=notrunc
6+0 records in
6+0 records out
# od -A d -x WindowsXP_1.vdi | more
0000000 3c3c 203c 6e69 6f6e 6574 206b 6956 7472
0000016 6175 426c 786f 4420 7369 206b 6d49 6761
0000032 2065 3e3e 0a3e 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000048 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000064 107f beda 0001 0001 0190 0000 0001 0000
0000080 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
*
0000336 0000 0000 0200 0000 f200 0000 0000 0000
0000352 0000 0000 0000 0000 0200 0000 0000 0000
0000368 0000 c000 0003 0000 0000 0010 0000 0000
0000384 3c00 0000 0628 0000 06c5 fa07 0248 4eb6
0000400 b2d3 2666 6fbb c1ca 8225 aae4 76b5 44f5
0000416 aa8f 6796 283f db93 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000432 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000448 0000 0000 0000 0000 0400 0000 00ff 0000
0000464 003f 0000 0200 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000480 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
*
0000512 0000 0000 ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
0000528 ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
*
0012544 0001 0000 0002 0000 0003 0000 0004 0000
Who needs a hex editor if you have good old friends od and dd on board? The trick is in the "conv=notruc" part. It tells dd to leave the rest of the file as is and not truncate it after doing it's patching job. Let's see if it works:
Heureka, it works! Notice that the second instance is running with the freshly patched harddisk image as shown in the window above.
Windows XP booted without any problem from the ZFS-cloned disk image. There was just the occasional popup message from Windows saying that it found a new harddisk (well observed, buddy!).
Thanks to ZFS clones we can now create new virtual machine clones in just seconds without having to wait a long time for disk images to be copied. Great stuff. Now let's do what everybody should be doing to Windows once a virus scanner is installed: Install Firefox:
I must say that the performance of VirtualBox is stunning. It sure feels like the real thing, you just need to make sure to have enough memory in your real computer to support both OSes at once, otherwise you'll run into swapping hell...
BTW: You can also use ZFS volumes (called ZVOLs) to provide storage space to virtual machines. You can snapshot and clone them just like regular file systems, plus you can export them as iSCSI devices, giving you the flexibility of a SAN for all your virtualized storage needs. The reason I chose files over ZVOLs was just so I can swap pre-installed disk images with colleagues. On second thought, you can dump/restore ZVOL snapshots with zfs send/receive just as easily...
Anyway, let's see how we're doing storage-wise:
# zfs list -rt filesystem poolchen/export/vm/winxp
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
poolchen/export/vm/winxp 1.36G 36.9G 21K /export/vm/winxp
poolchen/export/vm/winxp/winxp0 1.22G 36.9G 1.05G /export/vm/winxp/winxp0
poolchen/export/vm/winxp/winxp1 138M 36.9G 1.06G /export/vm/winxp/winxp1
Watch the "USED" column for the winxp1 clone. That's right: Our second instance of Windows XP only cost us a meager 138 MB on top of the first instance's 1.22 GB! Both filesystems (and their .vdi containers with Windows XP installed) represent roughly a Gigabyte of storage each (the REFER column), but the actual physical space our clone consumes is just 138MB.
Cool thing #4: ZFS clones save even more space, big time!
How does this work? Well, when ZFS creates a snapshot, it only creates a new reference to the existing on-disk tree-like block structure, indicating where the entry point for the snapshot is. If the live filesystem changes, only the changed blocks need to be written to disk, the unchanged ones remain the same and are used for both the live filesystem and the snapshot.
A clone is a snapshot that has been marked writable. Again, only the changed (or new) blocks consume additional disk space (in this case Firefox and some WinXP temporary data), everything that is unchanged (in this case nearly all of the WinXP installation) is shared between the clone and the original filesystem. This is de-duplication done right: Don't create redundant data in the first place!
That was only one example of the tremenduous benefits Solaris can bring to the virtualization game. Imagine the power of ZFS, FMA, DTrace, Crossbow and whatnot for providing the best infrastructure possible to your virtualized guest operating systems, be they Windows, Linux, or Solaris. It works in the SPARC world (through LDOMs), and in the x86/x64 world through xVM server (based on the work of the Xen community) and now joined by VirtualBox. Oh, and it's free and open source, too.
So with all that: Happy virtualizing, everyone. Especially to everybody near Stuttgart.
"VirtualBox and ZFS: The Perfect Team" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-02-19 13:18:18.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
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