A View from the Rainy Northwest Kier Gombart's Weblog

So, I let the install run in the background, and after about 10 mins the xvm bits were installed.  After a quick reboot, I was able to log into the BUI from the server's console.  I followed the wizard to specify my network info for the server, set the admin's password and name my xvm server.  With the network plumbed, I was then able to move to my workstation browser and work with xVM's main BUI console.  Checkpoint... I'm installed and ready to work with guest domains.. Now the fun begins!

xVM Server Main Console (browser user interface)

I got my hands on a very early access version of xVM Server, Sun's new virtualization appliance, so cool!  I'm doing the install now, part 1... Wish me luck!

Today, Sun Microsystems is shipping their update to xVM Ops Center, version 1.1.  Each release improves upon the previous, this one's got much better OS update capabilities and even snappier.  I could be biased, being part of the Sun xVM team and all, but our development and QA test teams have done a fantastic job getting this update ready.  I couldn't resist a test drive, but this install, I wanted to do it in style. 

I downloaded the latest version of xVM VirtualBox 1.6 and our latest shipping Solaris 10 update 5.  After about 3 minutes of download and install time for xVM VirtualBox (that included making a dynamically growing file system), I kicked off the Solaris install.  The performance was very good, almost like I was installing natively on a server.

But... darn.. I made the partition too small for xVM Ops Center (it likes space for its image libraries and file caching).  No problem in VirtualBox... I created another dynamic disk file, about 100gb, and added it to my Solaris 10 virtualbox as a secondary IDE.  A quick reconfigure reboot of my Solaris OS, a newfs command on c0d1s2, a quick edit of the /etc/vfstab, and a final mountall and I had the 100gb available.

I fired up a Firefox browser, and downloaded xVM Ops Center 1.1 (right after the first version was posted).  This was probably the slowest part, as I was using NAT through my system, through our corporate VPN, and down to my virtualbox server, about 100KB/s. (I'm always amazed all this networking works... so would you be if you knew what was happening behind the scenes to make this happen)  I gunzip'd it, untar'd it, then ran through a flawless install on my new 100gb vdisk.    Then typed in my server name and port 9443 into my local Solaris browser... and bingo! I was up and running.  My next task is to fire up two more virtualbox servers (Solaris and SuSe Linux), and I'll do some xVM management.  Sweet!

 Note: this was for demo purposes only.  While all may work in this configuration, it has not been tested. :)

I'm very excited to announce that OpenxVM.org now has a technical community manager, welcome Scott Lehman.   Expect things to heat up on http://openxvm.org fast as Scott starts building the community and moving code out there.

Scott began his computer career in 1982 when he developed material-handling and sample-processing applications for radio carbon labs while earning archeology and business degrees from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.  Convinced of the computer's transformative abilities, Scott spent the next 26 years immersed in the IT industry from development to management.  Scott spent the early days of his career developing and testing systems in industries as diverse as science, sports marketing, graphics, telecommunications, health care, finance, and merchandising.  Never being one to stray too far from academia, Scott earned his MBA in 1990 from the University of Colorado in Boulder where he now makes his home. 

Following graduate school, Scott's career focused in the area of application life cycle management and specifically, software configuration management.  After a number of years of consulting and developing a winning methodology, Scott founded SCM Labs to provide a complete range of SCM consulting, training, and product solutions to enterprise and commercial clients nation wide.  Scott's unique contribution to the field of SCM, which formed the basis of SCM Labs' consulting and product solutions, is a comprehensive release-based SCM methodology that incorporates Version Control, Build Control, Change Control, and Dependency Control into a business process encompassing people, process, and technology.  Scott has spoken at numerous events and national conventions about SCM and has published several papers on the subject.  Most recently, Scott used his accumulated IT experience to manage the turnaround of a large software development shop that found elusive the goal of delivering software projects on-time and on-budget. 

Scott is an enthusiast of technology of all kinds: planes, cars, tools, and of course, computers.  When not indulging his technology habit, Scott can be found raising his young daughter and black lab, hunting, collecting art, cooking, 4-wheeling, and traveling.  Subscribe to his blog at http://blogs.sun.com/slehman

 

At the end of November, I had a chance to get out to the IEC to meet face to face with our SunMC, SPS and xVM Ops Center QA and engineering teams.  Great experience!  Finally met my IEC QA team, led by Jai Ram Singh....put faces to voices, and got to visit a truly awesome part of our world...southern India.

In addition to seeing what they were working on, like xVM hypervisor training and qualifying hardware for xVM Ops Center, I also had the chance to be a part of the Harish Arora IEC team building event: the Jungle Gym, .  We went south of Bangalore about 2 hours, out of the fast paced, crowded city, navigating pothole roads and avoiding herds of goats, to arrive in a slow moving, serene jungle on the Cauvery river.  The pics say it all.  Thanks to Harish and Jai Ram for their hospitality and taking me along for their team building event.
 

From left: Prasanna, Alka, Partha, JG Kannan, Amaresh, Kier, Jai Ram, Saju, Ajay, Ganesh and Prabodh

 

Harish overseeing the Jungle rope swing 

 

The jungle resort in the valley 

 

A tricky balance beam done as a team 

The rope swing   

The splash pool... ugg! 

Splash!!!

 

Working on loan to our friends in the Blackbox team, Carl Meske has been hard at work on getting basic monitoring and instrumentation in place for the RR release of Project Blackbox.  Just this week, he tagged an internal unit using Sun Connection Inventory and Service Tags.  Just imagine... a customer gets a blackbox and a payload of green systems like T2000s and our new Sun Blade 6000s... they run the registration to enable Sun Service support, and see their entire inventory in one portal.  Their SAs group them and run reports to show the new gear they've just brought online. 

Even better... they bring up their newly discovered gear in xVM Ops Center, and kick off provisioning jobs to get Solaris 10 and Linux running on them... but stay tuned for that later. ;)

Kier
*ps... I added the blackbox image below... but a good RFE to consider

 

I caught up on Oren's blog, our fearless marketing director, and found his latest entry to be bold in it's transparency.  He's right... in the fact that comments are coming in on 3 different product... and I don't think any of them were on the product we wanted to get feedback on.  The good thing about these comments, is that it puts real customer feedback behind some of the defects we've seen in these products/services.  Being in Ops myself... I like this... as it gives us balance in our pursuit of what to fix (not just the difficult to manage parts of the applications, but also the customer pain points). 

Oh, and Oren's apparently my arch nemesis. ;)

I AM 79% OPTIMUS PRIME

Take the Transformers Quiz

I've been following Chris Melissinos' blog to keep up on what's cool in the world of Sun and gaming.  If you aren't familiar Project Darkstar, this demo will surely blow your mind on what one can do with Java!

Gaming Demo!

Kier

 

I had a chance to test drive SunMC 4.0, Sun's latest version of the Enterprise level monitoring and management tool.  I didn't have a Sparc machine handy to load it onto, but with 4.0... an x86 server works just fine for the server (yes... the server now runs on Solaris 10 X86).  First impression... excellent installation, sporting both a TUI and GUI install.  Also, I could tell right away why early users have been raving about the snappy DB performance (postgres so much better).  It sports both a java based console and a web console.

So rev up your Sun Download Manager, because it's coming to a download location near you this month!

Kier

 

Sun has just released an Inventory channel off Sun Connection used to register your assets, group them, track service contract IDs and report on all of it.  This is a foundational component for future Sun Connection channels such as Sun Update, OS provisioning, application provisioning, and monitoring.  The cool feature around this inventory service is the discovery client.  Sun is bundling Service Tags into all OS and software products, so soon discovery of new assets onto your network will be a breeze.  For existing system, you just deploy the tags to each asset you want discovered, run the java web start client, and then go to the Inventory portal.

cool stuff! 

 

I was reviewing our May business update and came across our mention in Business Ethics magazine. "One of the “100 Best Corporate Citizens, 2007” – Business Ethics magazine"  This got me thinking about some of the stuff I hear from my employees and their involvement in the community. 

A great example is from a member of my team, Jen Simsick, project manager extraordinaire.  Jen has been volunteering every Saturday to help make life better for some special members of our community at the Colorado Therapeutic Riding Center.  Even got a mention in the local paper and on Fox News.  Volunteering time to help out our communities is just one thing we do to earn that badge of Best Corporate Citizen.  Thanks Jen!

Clarissa Nielsen, production ops manager on my team, just completed her foundation certification for ITIL.  

Great job Clarissa!
 

Sun Connection Availability

I pulled together some data on the availability of our applications over Q3 to make sure our customers were getting the service they need, and to measure the effectiveness of our Operations and Engineering teams in delivering top notch service availability for Sun Connection applications. 

We set a target of 99.5% availability as the lower spec limit (and strive to blow this out of the water every month).  The data in these charts is different than standard url pings, as they are run from 5 to 9 global Internet sites, using a service from Mercury.  The measurements represent a user logging into the application, or accessing a service (commonly referred to as customer experience monitoring).  So, ALL unavailability, including Internet congestion, service outages, or even planned maintenance, is reflected in these numbers.

Overall, we are doing pretty good.  For most services... we are four 9's or above.  The Sun Update service seems to just stay around 99.7+%.  We've had issues, mostly Tahiti eligibility availability, some database failures and problems with JMS messaging, that impacted this number.  Over time, we've been adding monitors (that is why some are marked n/a). 

The performance graph below shows that the services have been responding consistently over the month.  The load on the production servers has been low (mainly due to the faster servers we migrated to last year), so I would expect these to stay in the normal range.  The top line seems high, but is in actuality a cumulative measurement of 4-5 screens (called a deep transaction).  We do this test to make sure the internals of the app are working.  The lines on the very bottom, are most likely just pings to verify the service is alive and responding.  Over time, we'd like to make these more complex to better measure the performance of that service.

For more info, please see our quarterly metrics site.

thanks...Kier

 

 

Every wonder what to do with all those mem sticks?  use them for zfs storage....

 look here

thanks to Mary for finding this nugget... ;)

Kier

 

I switched over to using Yahoo Mail Beta...and wow... they are getting really good at making web apps that look and feel like you are running the app local.  Sure... it's still a little laggy on performance... but they are really getting the GUI mapped out well.  Just think... when everyone moves to apps on the Internet like this, and the backend searches and file manipulation are done at Internet SuperGiants... just think of the compute and storage they will need!  Check it out!