Mike Ramchand's blog, covering mainly JET (Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit), but with diversions into other stuff, like sailing.. JET Stream

I was giving my standard pitch covering Sun Virtualisation Technologies which essentially entails me talking at length about the following slide. I kind of make the point that it is a means not an end, and that really what you're trying to do is run more applications on the same piece of hardware, and the trick is to try and do it most efficiently.

I've done this talk countless times with a pretty wide variety of customers, and I tend to start talking from the right, and move to the left, explaining how the "layer of additional non app resource utilisation" grows from right to left. (not true for Dynamic System Domains on the far left though.)

It finally occurred to me yesterday that the Unix and Windows world have an utterly different view of Virtualisation, and the need for Virtual Machines.

In the Unix world, application co-existence is second nature to most sys-admins. Virtualisation is all about application isolation. i.e. You START with all the apps on a single O/S instance, and you apply more and more constraints: resource management --> containers/zones --> virtual machines --> dynamic system domains.

In the Windows world, application co-existence is so rare that it isn't even considered. Virtualisation is all about application consolidation. (and the primary way to do it is to create lots of virtual machines, one per app).

The problem is simply viewed from completely different angles.

It's not just an application co-existence issue either. There's a scalability problem. A lot of "other" O/S's can't scale to fit the larger more powerful Intel/AMD multi-core servers available today, and the ONLY way to make use of them is to carve them up into smaller machines that Windows or Linux can digest. Solaris, on the other hand can scale up to hundreds of CPUs, and hundreds of Gigabytes of memory.

From the slide above, Sun/Solaris provides a wide choice of technologies to allow multiple applications to be consolidated onto a single server. Don't let the limitations of "other" O/S's blinker you into thinking that a Virtual Machine is the only answer. 

(I'm not saying that Virtual Machines is the WRONG answer btw, it's ONE of the answers, but it shouldn't be the only one that is considered.)

tags: virtualization containers ldom zones vmware xen

 So, I've been working on JET 4.7 for a while now. A couple of weeks ago I released it internally to Sun, and no-one's complained about any showstopping bugs yet, so I've released a fresh bundle to the sun.com downloads site. The best way to go straight to it is to follow the link at the top of the wiki site.

JET 4.7 Changes:

The MAJOR JET change is that I've kind of merged JetNAS functionality into the main SUNWjet module. This isn't an exact replication of the JetNAS code, and it does things a little differently, but in short you can choose to place the NFS functionality somewhere different from your JET server.

Other JET changes are covered by bugids: 6835016, 685027, 685023, 685019, 685030.

In summary:

6835016:  JET needs to support alternative servers for NFS media. The JET User Guide has already been updated to cover this functionality. Additionally, I've written a short article about it on the JET wiki site.

685027:  JET jetjump.xml script does not stop graphical login from starting. Tidied it up. graphical login no longer starts until J/S is complete.

685023: JET should not create /dhcp directory. We used to do this to shorten the dhcp macro. This is no longer necessary, so we've removed the complication of having it.

685019: JET ksh scripts do not work when using OpenSolaris. There were a couple of constructs in our ksh code that ksh93 choked on. We've updated them so that they are compatible with ksh and ksh93. This allows all you OpenSolaris people to install JET on your OpenSolaris based Jumpstart server. (Note, AI is required to "jumpstart" OpenSolaris.)

685030: JET error message when suitable server is not found could be more meaningful. Well, this is just an attempt to reduce the e-mail traffic. Probably the first error, people new to JET see. We've updated the error message to tell you what to do to fix it.

JET 4.6 - 4.7 Change Summary:

For all you "external" people, the last externally available version was 4.6. Here are the changes from 4.6 - 4.7:

4.6.1: Ability to compress the rpool, and specify /var for zfs boot builds.

4.6.2: 6798648: JET needs to workaround Bug: 6528699: This is to stop Jumpstart from labelling ALL your disks and blowing away all your data. Also added a tweak to the ssh scripts to generate the keys properly.

4.6.3: Added an additional bootadm update-archive to the end of the finish.common script. We were getting some situations where the first reboot had a stale boot-archive, possibly due to a race condition in SPARC S10 Update 6 and above builds.

JET bundled Modules:

We've updated some/most of the bundled products. ALL of them (if required) have been updated to make them ksh93 compatible. Some of them have had more substantial changes:

JetLDOM

This module has had the most substantial rewrite. We've gone against ALL JET precedent and completely changed the structure of the ldom.conf file, so it's not backward compatible (for once). We needed to do that so that we could provide a much easier mechanism to make use of the ldm 1.3 functionality. Sorry.... but you'll like the new one better.

JetFLASH

I've updated JetFLASH so that is actually checks the flar (if it can), to see that it is the right architecture, and the right boot filesystem for the build. (Yes, zfs based flash is coming, but it is a different format to the ufs based one). Bruce added some code to clean up service tags if required.

JetZFS

Quite a few changes in this module. You can now update your rpool properties, I've provided more verbose progress messages (so you can see exactly what it is doing), added code to deal with converting EFI disks back to SMI (it does it for you if required), and finally added a strange hack so that you can optionally use ::: instead of = in your variables to get around a xVM OC gui restriction.

JetZONES

Fixed a bug where make_template was in the wrong place, and added some code to boot the zone before trying to add stuff to the rootpath/var dir. (because it might not be there unless the zone is booted). (Thanks to Mike Hendon for pointing it out). (plus a bunch of new functionality like support for branded zones)

Summary

So just a reminder, the following modules have NEW template variables. Old templates (other than the ldom based ones) will continue to work, but if you want to make use of the new functionality (with the new comments that describe them), you'll need to refresh your templates. (Have a scan through sample.template in /opt/SUNWjet/Templates to see what's changed.)

tags: Solaris JET Jumpstart