Finally have networking going on OSX

I have been having trouble getting guest OS networking going with VirtualBox 1.6.4 using a variety of  guest OS's on my mac book pro. I have been trying Ubuntu (Gutsy), OpenSolaris and Sugar OS (from OLPC,the one laptop per child project) as VirtualBox guests  but to date had not been able to get networking functioning properly. I finally have both Ubuntu and OpenSolaris networking and full screen modes working now quite nicely.

The things that really helped me  with VirtualBox 1.6.4 were Dana's blog entry on the subject  and the following points in particular : - 

• The comment not to rely on ping/ICMP as the VirtualBox documentation apparently makes it clear that this is unreliable.
  
• The reader comment at the bottom of this blog saying that the DNS server installed by NWAM of 10.2.3 doesn't work. 
  

So on both OpenSolaris and Ubuntu I manually edited the /etc/resolv.conf and inserted the value for nameserver that I determined from looking at cat /etc/resolv.conf on OS X. I then bring up the browser (not ping) and I can indeed access the internet and browse the web. I really need to get the Sugar/XO laptop emulator working in VirtualBox so this is my next target.

 Oh the one thing folks might also find useful is that to operate OpenSolaris in fullscreen mode on OSX simply mount the VirtualBox guest additions (part of the download package I think) and do perform a packageadd. Once you have done this logout/log back in again and you can use apple-f to go to full screen and apple-f to get back out.

Sun Pushes Price/Performance boundaries with SPECjAppServer2004 result of 778.14 JOPS featuring Postgres on T2000

Sun is once again pushing the price/performance envelope for open source software. On Monday 9^th July 2007 Sun published a SPECjAppServer2004 result of 778.14 SPECjAppServer2004JOPS@Standard. So what you may say , whats in this for me or why do I care ?

Well you might care because : -

1. You are probably using or planning to use open source software and this is an all open source result, the Solaris operating system is open source, the Sun application server (Glassfish V1) is open source, the database (Postgres) is open source , even the SPARC processor in the database server is open.

2. The price/performance of this result using open source is compelling. The entire cost of the Sun system using Postgres / T2000 is approx $US 65K (hardware and software) yet the performance is comparable to other SPECjAppServer2004 results using only commercial “closed source” products or mostly “closed source” products. For example the recent HP result of 874.17 JOPS* has a cost of approx $US 187K
   See HP pricing details here and see below for pricing calculations on the Sun result)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. This demonstrates the benefits and performance of the Postgres database especially when running on the Sun cool threads servers (SunFire T2000).  Note : Jignesh Shah has done work on demonstrating Postgres scaling on T2000 on 2, 4, 6 and 8 cores.

4. SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark is a web application and quite likely models (to some degree) web applications that you are developing or deploying in your organisation. So yes SPECjAppServer2004 is a benchmark and benchmarks are limited but this one is designed to be relevant to the web applications in your business.

5. Mostly you might care because you are probably using or interested in using open source software and Sun is a major open source vendor and is working with important open source communities to drive the performance and price/performance of an enterprise supported open source stack ..this should help you to save money!

    

Interesting notes :

• We are in the early stages of a continuing effort at Sun to use industry standard benchmarks to drive the performance and price performance of the web application open source stack.... so expect even better performance and price/performance results in the near future.

• The focus of this particular benchmark was on the T2000/Postgres performance so we didn't work too much tuning on the Glassfish/X4200 application servers and in fact they are not being fully utilised. We are planing on taking advantage of the significant performance improvements with Glassfish V2 in the near future to further highlight the Glassfish and X4200 server price/performance advantages along with the Postgres/T2000 advantages !

• Notice that the Sun result with T2000/Postgres uses only 12 disk spindles in the StorageTek 2540 where most other comparable SPECjAppServer2004 results are using significantly more spindles/storage, the advantages here are  price reduction and an improvement in reliability!

• If you work with Postgres especially with web applications , check out the benchmark result “full disclosure report” and download the “full disclosure archive” for all of the postgres and glassfish tuning.

Community and Team Effort

Lots of thanks are due to members of the Postgres community for this result and in particular Dave Cramer who heads up the PostgreSQL JDBC team and to Gavin Sherry a Postgres contributor from Sydney Australia ! Jignesh Shah (Sun) provided much of the Solaris tuning so checkout Jignesh's blog at http://blogs.sun.com/jkshah/entry/specjappserver2004_and_postgresql also Sun's Josh Berkus (Postgres guru) mentored the entire Postgres side of things (http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/database/soup/archives/postgresql-publishes-first-real-benchmark-17470) .

Pricing calculations for Sun 778.14 JOPS result

• I have used the bill of materials (bom) from the benchmark result to price this result.

• All hardware prices come directly from the Sun US website as at 6^th July 2007
  go to http://www.sun.com/servers , choose a server and use the “get it” tab to be taken to the Sun store where you will find the pricing information

• I have omitted minor items from the pricing like a keyboard etc

• The pricing doesn't include support but if it did the result would look even better !

Required disclosure : -

All comparisons are based on the SPEC SPECjAppServer2004JOPS@Standard metric from www.spec.org or
on pricing made using the bill of materials included in each SPECjAppServer2004 result
Sun result details at http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2004/results/res2007q3/jAppServer2004-20070606-00065.html
HP result details at http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2004/results/res2007q2/jAppServer2004-20070410-00060.html
Sun Fire X4200 (6 chips, 12 cores) 778.14 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.
HP rx2660 (2 chips, 4 cores) 874.61 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.

SPEC, SPECjAppServer reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.
Results from www.spec.org as of 7/10/07