Hugo Rivero's Weblog |
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Wednesday Nov 26, 2008
Hyperic HQ on OpenSolaris and MySQL Internetnews ran this article on how the open source system management space is heating up. It discusses Groundwork, Zenoss and Hyperic, three examples in a growing field of players that also includes Nagios and Ganglia. As these tools expand their capabilities from basic system monitoring into application management, they are increasing the pressure on well established vendors. Hyperic, for example, has plugins for Glassfish and MySQL, among many others. I downloaded the Hyperic HQ Open Source Edition 4.0.1 (the no-JRE, platform independent tarball) and tried it on OpenSolaris. Robert Lor has already documented how to install the Hyperic Server on PostgreSQL, so I decided to use it with MySQL instead. Pretty simple to set up. I used MySQL 5.0, via the SUNWmysql5 package from the OpenSolaris repository (if you want step-by-step instructions on how to get MySQL on OpenSolaris, see here). The database configuration for Hyperic is well documented here. Once the database part is done, set JAVA_HOME to the location of your Java runtime (for example, to the default of /usr/java), and run setup.sh -mysql. If you only want to deploy the agent component, just download the corresponding tarball and run hq-agent.sh start. I have included the full output of these commands at the end of this blog entry. As the agent was started, it detected the system information automatically, and updated the inventory at the server. Here's a screen shot of the web management console, on port 7080 by default:
I was able to drill down into charts for network and cpu utilization as well. Very nice. It's good to know that, if you use Hyperic, you can add OpenSolaris to your infrastructure and manage it the same way. Now, if we can only get it to report "OpenSolaris" instead of "Solaris 11". Time to file and RFE!
Here's the output of HQ Server installation. I only installed the Server in this step. The tarball (hyperic-hq-installer-4.0.1-905-noJRE.tgz) was uncompressed and untared in the /Apps/Hyperic directory.
hugo@hugo_osol:/Apps/Hyperic/hyperic-hq-installer$ ./setup.sh -mysql And here's the output of the Agent installation, from the hyperic-hq-agent-4.0.1-905-noJRE.tgz tarball. Also placed in the /Apps/Hyperic directory:
hugo@hugo_osol:/Apps/Hyperic/hyperic-hq-agent-4.0.1/bin$ ./hq-agent.sh start Posted at 04:33PM Nov 26, 2008 by hugo in Sun | Comments[1]
Monday Nov 17, 2008
Going back in time with ZFS With OpenSolaris 2008.11 just around the corner, there are a number of interest features I wanted to take for a test drive. One of them is the combination of Automatic Snapshots and the Time Slider utility. With ZFS, taking and storing snapshots has become a very lightweight operation: they can be created almost instantly, and initially consume no additional disk space. Many Solaris users have created their own scripts to implement a backup policy based on them. So it seems natural to provide this as a standard OS service. Tim Foster has done just that, providing five SMF services to capture ZFS snapshots at regular intervals:
$ svcs auto-snapshot The default settings for frequency and retention policies are:
How do you turn this on? While this could be done by setting the com.sun:auto-snapshot property to true on the target file system(s), there's a Time Slider Setup GUI (under System/Administration in the menu) to make things easier. You can choose to run auto-snapshots for all file systems, or select individual ones. For the icing on the cake, a time slider has been integrated into GNOME's Nautilus file manager, so you can "travel back in time" to see individual files from any of your snapshots. See Erwann's Chénedé's blog for details, including screen shots. I often need to recover older version of documents to undo recent changes, only to discover that I forgot to save a copy. If you're like me, these new tools are a great time saver. Turn the service on, and let it do the work for you. Note: In the OpenSolaris 2008.11 development builds (snv_101a_rc1b in my case) there is an issue with the zfssnap role not being able to run cron jobs. If you try this on early access bits, apply the changes suggested here. Check the services' logs at /var/svc/log/ for troubleshooting.
Posted at 10:35AM Nov 17, 2008 by hugo in Sun |
Friday Nov 07, 2008
OpenSolaris shows up at SPEC Industry standard benchmarks play an important role. And not just as product marketing tools. With a multitude of hardware and software combinations, most customers cannot allocate time and resources to do a thorough comparison of all the choices, and appreciate the contribution of standard bodies that define relevant workloads and consolidate performance results. SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) is a prime example. With its strict run rules and review process, it forces vendors to always put their best foot forward. Which makes the publication of a couple of OpenSolaris SPEC results a significant milestone.
The first one is SPECfp2006, often considered the leading indicator of a system's performance for HPC applications. It is a cpu-intensive benchmark, where the OS and compiler play a key role in extracting every ounce of performance from the underlying hardware. To get a good feel for how OpenSolaris and Sun Studio compare to other OS/Compiler stacks, I looked at all results using Intel's quad-core Xeon X5482 at 3.2GHz, all seven of them run on dual-socket systems. Here's the summary (click on the score to see the full report):
The combination of OpenSolaris and Sun Studio gives other more entrenched solutions a run for their money. They are free to use, and Sun Studio comes with a nifty Performance Analyzer tool. Why not give them a try? If you're on OpenSolaris, run pkg install sunstudioexpress to get started. The second benchmark is SPECjAppServer2004, which tests the performance of a multi-tier Web stack, including application server and database. It is quite active, with over 70 results from all major hardware and software players in the Enterprise Java space. What makes this result significant? That the OS (OpenSolaris 2008.05), the database (MySQL 5.0) and the Application Server (GlassFish Enterprise Server v2) are all open source. In fact, Sun is the only vendor that has published a result that doesn't rely on proprietary software. Beyond getting kudos from FOSS advocates, there is a strong reason why this SPECjAppServer result is very relevant: customers are asking not for performance at any price, but performance at the right price. And the price/performance numbers speak for themselves, showing a 10x advantage over proprietary solutions. Take a look at Tom Daly's blog or BM Seer's blog for in-depth analysis. This more cost-efficient, open-source-based stack does not mean customers have to endure higher risk. All of the components, while free to download and use, can be covered by a 24x7 support contract, in compliance with the benchmark rules.
Disclosure Statement: Posted at 11:49AM Nov 07, 2008 by hugo in Sun | |
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