Hi,

I will leave Sun to the 31.12.2008. I blog on a new site www.vmachine.de.

Hope you find this site.

Have fun.

Thomas

The virtualization market is a very big market all over the world. A lot of key players work on a lot of products to win customer in this market.

It is not easy to differ from the other big player in this market. All companies exhibit good products. First of all is VMware with the great Virtual Infrastrcture 3 which is the product with the biggest piece of cake. But also Microsoft, Citrix, Novell, Parallels and many other play in this market a big role.

So, what is the benefit from Sun? Why I choose Sun as customer? I think the most important benefit is that Sun is the only company which deliver a complete computing stack for virtualization.

We deliver the physical hardware with High-End Servers, Storage Systems and ThinClients. We develop our own Hypervisor xVM which is available soon, we work together with VMware, we have one of the best Connection Broker for Desktop Virtualization, a management layer and we have the Delivery teams.

Today we released a new version of Sun VirtualBox. I think the feature list is a bit short for a new major release but okay. Version 2.0 introduce the following new features:

• support for 64-bit guest OSes (Microsoft Windows Vista and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5)
• support for AMD RVI
• support for Microsoft VHD virtual disk format
• new interface for Apple Mac OS edition (native 10.5 Leopard GUI)
• Python API (for Solaris and Linux hosts only)

I think that the deveoloper go the right way. Support for the Microsoft virtual disk format for example is a great new feature. With the possibility to use VMware´s disk format you are able to run all your vm´s from the big guys in the virtualization world.

You can download VirtualBox 2.0 fore FREE here

Today I will write about a great subject which means a lot to me.
I read so often that people will use NFS as a cheap and easy shared storage for VMware ESX.
Conceptional! If you want to test something in a test environment, you need cheap storage or what ever you can use NFS. But why so much pepole will use NFS on Linux? There is not one benefit against NFS on ZFS with Solaris 10/Nevada. So lets use a great protocol from the same vendor who develop a very great filesystem and operating system. Lets checkout NFS and ZFS with Solaris...

VMware ESX, Solaris 10/Nevada with ZFS. The perfect NFS...

First, I will show you the benefits of NFS:

• You can use NFS fore free
• You dont need new hardware or something like FC-Switches
• Easy administration
• Use your infrastructure
• ...
  

Now I will show you some benefits of ZFS:

• Filesystem and Volumemanger in one system
• Easy administration with only 2 commands - #zpool and #zfs
• advanced raid level and functions
• snapshots
• automatic checksum over all data
• 128 Bit
• automatic shrinking and growing volumes
• ...

So, I think we are ready to start with this great couple.

The first you need to do is to download the free Solaris OS from Sun. You can download Solaris 10 at www.sun.com. Its also possible to use the upcoming Solaris in a Developer Edition. Solaris Nevada is available at www.opensolaris.org but there is no possibility to buy support at the moment.

Dont be scared ahead the installation of Solaris! A lot of pepole wirte me that they don´t want to install Solaris but it is so easy with the new versions like Windows or Linux. Just test it! You need only a fews clicks to complete the installation.

After you installed Solaris we can create a ZFS Pool.

In the Bash (right click the desktop and then terminal) you can initiate all hdd´s with "#disk" and show all disks with "#format". You need a minimum of 2 hdd´s in the system because you can´t install ZFS volumes on the system disk.

We can create now a pool with for example 4 hdd´s. Just set up this command:

"#zpool create zfspool raidz c0d1 c1d1 c2t0d0 c2t1d0"

What happend now? We create a ZFS Pool with the 4 HDD´s c0d1 c1d1 c2t0d0 c2t1d0. The ZFS Pool is mounted to /zfspool. The pool is directly a RAIDZ. This is a sepcail RAID level for ZFS. It´s like Raid 5 with better functions because there isn´t a write break between „date-write“ and „parity-write! That´s it! Easy going or what do you think?
With the command "#zpool" list it is possible to see your ZFS Pool.

In this ZFS Pool it is possible to create a lot of ZFS Volumes. This is a great option. Because all volumes shrink and grow automatic you must just watch the size of the pool. The volumes mange themself.

"#zfs create zfspool/VMware_ESX_NFS"

With this command we create the new Volume in the pool.



Now you have a full functional ZFS Volume with RAIDZ and you only use 2 commands. I think this is very great!
In this example you see the automatic growing and shrinkingoption. I copy a file to the filesystem and delte it again and the Volume has the same size as before.

Now we are ready to share the ZFS Volume over NFS to our ESX Server.

Firt we need to setup the vmkernel at our ESX Server. Over the vmkernel the ESX connect to the NFS Server.
Connect with the VI Client to the ESX Server or Virtucal Center and configure this option.

After you have done this, we can configure the ZFS Volume that it is possible that the ESX Server can connect to ths NFS volume.

#share –F nfs –o rw,root=192.168.36.204 /zfspool/esx_nfs_datastore

Now the ESX Host can access the NFS datastore. If you have more then one ESX host you can add more IP adresses to this command.

This is just a short view for the options with ZFS and NFS. I hope you read this article and test this great couple. Solaris, NFS and ZFSis a greap option for a cheap, fast and save storage system on a ESX Server.

Feedback is welcome.

Wish you all guys a nice day,

Thomas

I had a great adventure with a taxi driver in Berlin. Between my customer and the airport we talked about his computer problems at home. „Vista sucks“ was his first comment with a mix from german, turkish and a berlin slang after I told him that I am working for a IT company. All of his programms to burn cd´s and watch videos in the internet do not work with vista and his new notebook is not able to run xp because the setup do not find a hard drive. (I told him I don´t know why setup can´t find a haddisk *g*) He is not able to rip dvd´s and so on. The only great thing is that vista looks so great and he love this style.
Lordly he told me a great solution. From a company which called „Sonne“ (german for Sun) he got a great tool called „VirtualBox“. With this gereat tool he can use Windows XP on his Vista PC with usb and all other features he need. He told me „This is the best tool ever“. I just agreed. :)

There are some other great news for our Server products.
We announce our new Server Systems with the Quad-Core AMD Opteron CPU´s.

• Sun Fire X4140, Sun Fire X4240, and Sun Fire X4440 servers featuring AMD Opteron processors
• Quad-Core AMD support for the Sun Blade X8440, Sun Fire X4200 M2, Sun Fire X4100 M2, and Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers
• The new Systems Content Channel at www.sun.com/systems
  

Hope the systems are certified for VI3 with Quad-Cores fast.
 

Great news!

The new version of Solaris 10 is ready to download.

Some new functions/features:

- Support for new Hardware
- CPU caps
- New Applications like Thunderbird, Firefox, Flash
- HW Key generating
- MPXIO for SAS HDDs
- p7zip compression tool
- GUI for PostGres
- ZFS Volumes as HDDs for ldoms
- Xorg and Xvnc server
- many bugfixes and better performance features

Download the new Solaris for free here 

The one and only IT Guy is back. The 5th Episode is called „Less is more“

Have fun... Watch the video here

Sun is doing a lot of work in the virtualization market. XVM, the bare-metal hypervisor, and VirtualBox, a hosted product, are in the news all the day.
Now, the great product „Containers“ are in the news too. You are now able to run Solaris 8, Solaris 9, Linux and Soalrs 10 applications in container hosted on a Solaris 10 Operating System.
For all who don´t know the containers I will write a entry the next days. It´s a interessting product.

Here are some interessting links:

BigAdmin artice to Containers/Zones
Solaris Containers – Get It
Great Artice about Linux in Containers on Solaris 10
Demo - Using Containers

I hope I will find the time to write a good artice next time.
 

At the big news site www.virtualization.info is a great picture of our upcoming products OpsCenter 2.0 and xVM 1.0.
At this picture you see a manages xVM Server with the OpsCenter.

Click the picture so see a full view. 

 

There was a very interessting discussion at a Sun internel VMware mailing list.
The subject was the installation of Solaris 10 Update 4 on a VMware ESX Server with Intel Xeon 5400 CPU´s.

Background! You must install a patch 127112-07 on Solaris 10 Update 4 to run Solaris on the Xeon 5400 CPU.

But how do I install this patch in a Solaris which crash at the start up? David wirte a small step by step for this.

Solaris installation:

• Install as 32 bit Solaris
• Boot failsafe, answer 'y' to mount /a
• edit /a/boot/grub/menu.lst to force booting in 32-bit mode:
• change multiboot line to ...multiboot kernel/unix
• reboot
• Install rest of CD's
• Logon as root
• Install patch 118855-19
• cd /net/patchdb.central/patches/patchroot/all_unsigned
• ls -l 118855*
• cp 118855-19.zip /tmp
• cd /tmp
• unzip 118855-19.zip
• patchadd -M . 118855-19
• reboot and test if Solaris works in 32 bit mode
• edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to force booting in 32-bit mode:
• change multiboot kernel/unix line to ...multiboot
• reboot
  

Test the system

Thanks guys!

Announce Availability of Sun Infrastructure Solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
SANTA CLARA, CA REDMOND, WA March 10, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) today announced two new milestones in their ongoing alliance - the official opening of the Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center on Microsoft's Redmond campus for optimizing Microsoft applications on Sun Fire x64 server systems and storage, and the availability of the Sun Infrastructure Solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. More information on the Sun Infrastructure Solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 is available at: http://www.sun.com/exchange and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/bb412164.aspx.

You can read the full article here

You find pictures of the Center here 

Hi all!

Today, I want to write about a complete other product from Sun. Since a few months I work with "Mr-IdM-Miagie" aka Chris in Wiesbaden to implement the Sun Identity Manager.
It’s a interesting project. The customer wants to connect more then 10 resources to the Identity Manager.
One of these resources is Lotus Domino. On Monday we get a test lab with a IdM VM and a physical Lotus Domino Test Server in a lab-network. The Domino server is a copy of the production environment.

We started to configure the “Gateway Service”. This Service must run on a windows machine and communicate with the IdM Server and the Lotus Domino machine.

After we unzip the gateway to C:\IdM\ we can install it as a service. Over the command line you can install the gateway as a service “C:\IdM\gateway.exe -i”

Before you can install the gateway you need to do something. There are some requirements:

<sub>Notes Client - The notes client was a standard installation from the customer.

All other requirements are in the resource-reference pdf:

Create the Identity Manager administrator in Domino. Use a certifier ID that
has access to all organizations needed to manage users.

Add the user to the access control list (ACL) of the address book for the server,
names.nsf.
Give the user Editor access.
Assign the user the following roles:
GroupModifier
UserCreator
UserModifier

Add the user to the ACL of the registration log, certlog.nsf, with Depositor
access.

Add the user to the ACL of the Administration Requests, admin4.nsf, with
Depositor access.

Add the newly-created user to server security:
Open the Security panel to edit the server configuration.
If access to the Domino server is restricted, make sure the Identity Manager proxy account has access to the server. This is done by specifying the account name or a group to which the proxy account belongs in the Access
Server field.
If there is a before or after action that calls a Domino agent, the user might need to be added to the Run nrestricted LotusScript/Java agents or Run restricted LotusScript/Java agent field, depending on how the  gent being called is configured.

Installing the Gateway to Support Domino
For the gateway to talk with Domino there must be a Notes client already installed
on the gateway machine
Add the following string values to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\
Waveset\Lighthouse\Gateway in the Windows registry to ensure Domino works
properly:
• notesInstallDir - This is the location where the client is installed and where
the notes.dll file is location. Typically, the location is something like
C:\Lotus\Notes\.
• notesIniFile - The full path to the Lotus Notes initialization file, including the
file name. You should copy the file from its default location (such as
C:\Lotus\Notes\notes.ini) to the directory containing the Identity Manager
gateway. Therefore, you should set the value of this registry key to a value
similar to C:\GatewayDir\notes.ini.</sub>

After this “pre installations” tasks we can create the gateway service and create the Lotus Domino Resource Adapter in IdM.

Over Resources and New Resource you can create a Domino Resource. If you do not see a Domino resource you must activate it in configure types.
To connect a domino resource you must fill out a lot of information. Host for example is the ip-address of you gateway host system. You also need information about the ID-files, certifier-ids, mail server and so on.
On the end of the site you can test the connection to the server. This fail!! We checked everything! The rights, the notes client connection and so on. After a few tests we saw on the Lotus Domino Server console that nothing connect to the domino server if we test it. If we connect with our notes client we saw a session which opens. After a lot of tests we reinstalled the notes client. We installed not the customer installation. It was a simple “Next, Next, Finish” installation. We configured the client with the IdM admin account.
After this reinstallation the gateway and adapter works very fine. We can connect to the Domino Server and see a open session.

On the next site you can configure the attribute mapping to the IdM system. We use the standard and do note change anything.

After we do all this things we write a correlation rule to map the users from the IdM system with the User in the Domino Server.

The synchronisation mapped a lot of users. We get a few errors, too. After a look to this accounts we saw that this accounts are not available in the IdM. This is ok for us because there are not all users in IdM.

It was very cool that the most things works out of the box. We can create, rename and delte users very simple.

That's our stand at the moment! We will test more on Monday!

Stay tuned...