Ops Center

Branded Zones in Ops Center 2.5

The branded zone facility in Solaris OS is an extension of the Solaris Zones. It lets you install Solaris 8 or 9 Containers in branded zones on a Solaris 10 OS system.

Sun Ops Center lets you create branded zones. Before creating branded zones, you must follow and verify certain instructions. We have put together the necessary steps that need to be followed before creating a branded zone in Ops Center.

For branded zone installation, the SUNWs8brandr and SUNWs8brandu packages must be installed in the global zone. These packages should have been installed on your system during Solaris OS installation. If not, install the following packages according to the Solaris 10 OS version on the global zone:

• Global zones that are running less than Solaris 10 10/08 OS version
  • SUNWbrandu and SUNWbrandr for Solaris 8 Containers
  • SUNWbrandu, SUNWbrandr, and SUNWbrandk for Solaris 9 Containers
• Global zones that are running Solaris 10 10/08 OS or later versions
  • SUNWbrandk for Solaris 8 or 9 Containers

These packages are available from the Solaris 10 OS media or from the Sun Download Center in the Solaris Containers 8 or 9 Product.

Ops Center provides Create Zone option to configure and install a zone. This option displays a Create Zone wizard which takes you through a series of steps to select the CPU model, network, file systems, and storage for the zone configuration. Take a look at the Solaris Containers section in the Wiki Documentation for detailed information.

When you create a branded zone in Ops Center, you must provide the image location for Solaris 8 or 9 Containers in the first step of the Create Zone wizard. You cannot use images that are available from the libraries that are associated with the global zone. Instead, download the flar images from the Sun Download Center and store them in one of the following locations and provide the image location while creating a branded zone:

• Global zone. Provide the image location as file:///path/of/the/image
• HTTP Server that is accessible from the global zone. Provide the image location as http://path/of/the/image
• FTP Server that is accessible from the global zone. Provide the image location as ftp://path/of/the/image

Apart from this, also watch out for the language selection in the Create Zone wizard. If you have selected a language in the wizard that is not installed in the flar, the create zone job fails.

These collective information should be helpful for a successful brand zone creation using Ops Center.

Posted at 01:33AM Nov 24, 2009 by Shanthi Srinivasan in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Sun Ops Center Training

Sun Ops Center is a big product, with a lot of functionality and a lot riding on it. Getting training in how to use it is kind of a big deal.

To that end, we've created a five-day course that covers pretty much every aspect of Ops Center - installation and configuration, existing features like asset management and OS provisioning and patching, and new features like Solaris Container and Sun Logical Domain management.

Take a look at the training page for more information about taking the training in person. There is a session at the end of this month.

There's also a version of this class taught in a Live Virtual Classroom. LVC classes are taught by a live instructor over a webcast, and they use the same labs as the in-person class.

So if you're looking to get started with Ops Center, or you want to learn about the new features, have a look.

Posted at 01:08PM Nov 11, 2009 by Owen Allen in Personal  |  Comments[0]

Patching Windows

Ops Center 2.5 includes a bunch of Windows management features. Chief among them is the ability to patch Windows operating systems through Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager. Here's how you do it:

First, you configure Ops Center to work with your SCCM 2007 instance. You do this by selecting Windows Update in the Administration section, and plugging in the credentials. Once you've done that, Ops Center can work with SCCM.

Before you can do the actual patching, you have to discover and manage the Windows systems. (See this post or this video for info about discovering and managing assets.)

You perform the actual update using reports. In the Reports section, set up and run a Host Compliance Report or an Incident Compliance Report on one or more Windows systems. These reports will tell you whether or not the systems are up to date. If they aren't, you can update them by clicking Make Targets Compliant, and configuring an update job.

We put together a screencast that walks through the Windows update process:

If you have any questions about this process, let me know.

Posted at 07:35AM Nov 02, 2009 by Owen Allen in Personal  |  Comments[3]

Asset Discovery video

Asset Discovery is a big part of Ops Center. Discovery searches for hardware and operating systems using established protocols and xml product identifiers called Service Tags. Through discovery, you can remotely identify assets in your data center and begin to manage them.

Discovery is one of the parts of Ops Center that's seen some refinement in 2.5. The new Discover and Manage Assets wizard lets you run a discovery and begin to manage the discovered assets with a single process. It starts by directing each Proxy Controller to search for Service Tags on its subnet. (Service Tags are embedded on most Sun products, and you can create them for other assets.) Once it's found assets, you supply credentials for them and Ops Center starts to manage them. On operating systems, this means installing Agent software to monitor the OS and enable patching.

We've put together a video that walks through a simple asset discovery using the new wizard:

We're putting together more videos on other new features, including Windows patching and zones. Do you have any other videos that you'd like to see? Let me know.

Posted at 05:00PM Oct 22, 2009 by Owen Allen in Personal  |  Comments[2]

Zones in Ops Center 2.5

One of the big deals in Ops Center 2.5 is the enhanced support for virtualization solutions such as Solaris Containers. It's something that we've been working on for a while - there was some support in 2.1 - but it's been beefed up a lot. So, what can you do with zones?

In Ops Center, zones are displayed like other assets. In the assets menu, they're displayed under the system that they're on. From there, you can monitor their resource utilization. You can do management actions like those you can do on other assets - boot them, shut them down, or delete them. You can also provision new global zones, and update the OSes for both global and local zones.

If you've created multiple zones through Ops Center, some other actions are available to you. You can migrate zones between containers. You can also manage the networks and storage associated with various zones.

So you can manage zones just like other assets via Ops Center, but you can also move them around and reassign resources for them remotely. I'll be doing some posts explaining how to perform some of these actions soon. You can also take a look at the zones section of the docs.

Posted at 08:44PM Oct 07, 2009 by Owen Allen in Personal  |  Comments[5]

Welcome to the Ops Center blog

Welcome to the new Ops Center blog! Sun Ops Center is our systems management tool, which lets you discover physical and virtual assets in your data center, manage and monitor them, provision OSes and firmware, and update OSes. This blog will contain news, interviews, features, and clever uses of Ops Center.

As you may know, we're just rolling out version 2.5 of Ops Center. (The story is on Sun.com, along with a video from Steve Wilson.) Ops Center 2.5 adds a bunch of features, including but not limited to:

• Support for Solaris Containers and Sun Logical Domains - You can create, clone, and migrate guests in Ops Center 2.5, and can automate management actions for them. (This is really too big a thing for a bullet list - it'll get its own post soon.)
• Streamlined install and configuration
• Streamlined upgrade process
• Support for Oracle Enterprise Linux (To install Ops Center on, as well as to discover and manage)
• Smart Groups
• Windows patching
• Solaris Live Upgrade software
• Notification enhancements

I'll be talking about these features in more detail in the coming days and weeks. There are also other resources for Ops Center information: the Information Exchange; the 2.5 documentation, and the official training.

Posted at 06:11AM Sep 30, 2009 by Owen Allen in Sun  |  Comments[6]