Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

Software Freedom Day in Sydney

Cristina Cifuentes invited me to speak at Michael Chan's (Campus Ambassador - UTS) Software Freedom Day event at UTS yesterday. The broad guidance given to me by Michael was "Alan can you talk about Solaris, ZFS and Zones. If possible can you demonstrate this?".

OK, I've not done a lot with zones, especially under OpenSolaris, and I do love a challenge.

Last year I spoke on a number of things at the day at Sydney Uni and I was a bit disappointed in the slideware I created for the stuff on ZFS. This year I decided that the best slides that I had seen on ZFS were from Jeff and Bill in their ZFS - The last Word in Filesystems presentations, so I used a few slides from there. The fun part was as I only had the pdf file I had to recreate the wonderful drawings they used on the slides I wanted. I learned a bit about drawing in OpenOffice doing this :) (and was told after I finished that apparently there is an OpenOffice plugin that will let you pull images out of pdf documents. oh well).

I also found someay good zones resources in sun blogs, most notably Cloning Zones by Brian Leonard.

Wikipedia was also helpful verifying some timelines for Solaris and OpenSolaris.

At the end of the slides I flipped over to a couple of terminal sessions and demonstrated cloning some simple zones as I'd outlined in the talk. Very simple zones with no resources imported or networks. The impressive stuff was that we could demonstrated that with cloning we could provision and boot a new clone in under 10 seconds, which lead nicely into Andrew Latham's talk on Cloud Computing.

Anyway, the pdf of the presentation can be downloaded here.

Posted at 11:30AM Sep 18, 2009 by Alan Hargreaves in OpenSolaris  |