Tuesday March 13, 2007

Last night I had a chance to walk through a Project Blackbox container as part of a NEOSUG tour. I'm not exactly sure what I was expecting, but I was surprised by the sheer solidity of the infrastructure. Everything about it felt very substantial: the electrical, water, and data hookups; the airflow system; the equipment racks and plumbing; even the doors. The shock absorbers mounted under each rack completed the impression that these units are engineered for real-world, mobile deployment.

The 2nd NEOSUG (New England OpenSolaris Users Group) meeting was held last night on Sun's Burlington campus. About 30 people attended Nils Nieuwejaar's talk on Solaris virtualization technologies and took a tour of Project Blackbox, which is visiting Burlington for a few days.

Nils covered Solaris Zones, BrandZ, and Xen in his talk (slides here). He also gave a good demo of Xen's live migration capability. He created a Solaris virtual machine on Machine A and started a compilation of Solaris. One command started the migration, which moved the virtual machine to Machine B with only the tiniest of pauses as the migration completed and the Solaris compilation continued uninterrupted on the new physical hardware. Sweet.

Due to interest expressed at the meeting, there will be a talk on SPARC virtualization technology (called LDOMS--Logical Domains) at the next NEOSUG meeting, tentatively scheduled for mid-May. There will also be a Solaris installfest for people who would like help installing OpenSolaris on their laptop, whether on bare metal or virtualized, as for example with Parallels on an Intel Mac.