Pierre Reynes's Old Weblog

New URL

I am going to use blogs.sun.com/PierreReynes instead of blogs.sun.com/joebar from now on

and this is why: http://blogs.sun.com/PierreReynes/entry/usernames

What is in the new Sun BluePrint "Running Oracle Real Application Clusters on Sun Logical Domains"

The recently published BluePrint titled "Running Oracle Real Application Clusters on Sun Logical Domains" provides all necessary instructions to install and run Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) on servers configured with Sun Logical Domains (LDoms). LDoms is a virtualization and partitioning technology supported on Sun CoolThreads-based servers (i.e. Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140, T5240 or T5440) using UltraSPARC T1, T2, and T2 Plus processors with chip multithreading (CMT) architecture. These servers support up to 256 virtual CPUs and 512 GB of physical memory in a very dense form factor.

The Blueprint provides detailed step-by-step instructions and is full of recommendations.
For example, did you know:

• It is possible to dynamically add or remove CPUs from an active domain as long as each domain running Oracle RAC has a minimum of 8 virtual CPUs (1 CPU core)?
• Running Oracle RAC on Logical Domains requires the use of Logical Domains Manager 1.0.3 or later, of at least Solaris 10 05/08 (Update 5) and of Oracle 10g R2 (Oracle 10.2.0.4)?
• Virtual disks shared by Oracle RAC guest domains should be backed by full physical SCSI disks or SCSI LUNs?
• You should make sure that shared LUNs appear with the same name in each guest domain? (the BluePrint explains why and how)

Before installing Oracle RAC on Sun LDoms, make sure that you download a copy this BluePrint it will surely save you a lot of time and avoid headaches!

How to run Windows for FREE using VirtualBox

By CNET TV, how to use VirtualBox to run Windows for free in a Virtual machine.

 Link to CNET Video

 Link to VirtualBox

OpenSolaris Launch at CommunityOne

On June 1st 2009, I was at CommunityOne as OpenSolaris 2009.06 was launched during John Fowler's talk show, joined by guests Greg Lavender, Director of Open Networking for OpenSolaris, Stephen Hahn, Technical Lead for OpenSolaris and Mike Shapiro, Technical Lead for OpenStorage.

OpenSolaris 2009.06 was positioned by John Fowler as the  preview release for the next generation of Solaris. It can be used from the data center to a laptop in a Virtual machine using VirtualBox.

Some of the OpenSolaris 2009.06 new features and demos caught my eye, here are some of my notes:

Stephen Hahn demoed SourceJuicer showing a one-click installation process. SourceJuicer offers a simple way for community members to contribute new packages in the OpenSolaris repository.

Greg Lavender demoed Crossbow. The Crossbow framework is a complete rearchitecture of the OpenSolaris networking stack that virtualizes the entire operating system network stack. During the Crossbow demo, Greg showed Dynamic pulling by dynamically adjusting the bandwidth control on a Web server at the VNIC level.

Stephen Hahn ran the demo of ZFS and Time Slider, a graphical Snapshot Management tool. Time Slider offers a graphical front-end to ZFS' revision and snapshot features.
ZFS takes snapshots every 15 minutes (using command zfs snapshot). During the demo, a picture of a frog turns into a picture of a tadpole as Stephen goes back to a previous snapshot and going back further, turns into a picture of frog eggs. John Fowler asked Stephen to go all the way back to the big bang but unfortunately it appears that ZFS snapshots were not enabled at the time.

Then Mike Shapiro talked about Flash Technologies and how ZFS can leverage different kinds of Flash for different types of usage. ZFS manages DRAM, Flash and disk drives automatically deciding what storage media to use and creates hybrid storage pools.

Also mentioned was the integration of Microsoft CIFS as a native protocol in kernel to allow better Microsoft server compatibility.

Finally, my favorite demo, Mike Shapiro demoed real-time usage of analytics in the user interface of a Sun Storage 7310 enterprise storage appliance. Because the Web administration interface leverages DTrace, it can provide complete, very granular and real-time usage Analytics. Mike first showed NFS ops/sec, querying live what files were being accessed over NFS. Then he entered a DTrace query, using the UI, to compare percentages of read and write workloads. Finally he showed a "heat map" of latencies for read operations as the 7310 was serving the requests backstage. I had the opportunity to go backstage just after the show and it was a true live demo. No smoke, no mirrors. I even helped the guys packing the 7310 unit (and the backup unit).

More on OpenSolaris
More on VirtualBox
More on Sun Storage 7310