Today, October 8 2009, coinciding with my personal 10 year anniversary in the US, Solaris 10 10/09 has been released and is available for free download here.
Major new features are around ZFS improvements and enhancements, and patching and packaging improvements.
So, if you attend, make sure to check out the plenty of Solaris demonstrations at Sun booth, and listen to the plenty of Solaris talks in the different meeting rooms.
One rather important, and interesting question is, 'how good or bad performance are we seeing in OpenSolaris' ?
Well, that is a though question to answer as there are many perspectives of performance, nonetheless there are interesting projects in the OpenSource community like the LibMicro Project that can help you analyze and compare different operating systems, or SysBench for Database performance.
Given that we didn't have much time since we got the final release of OpenSolaris 2009.06 until the launch date, we did some partial tests to analyze the performance of OpenSolaris. Please note that these are only partial results and that official benchmark results using industry standard benchmarks will come after the launch !
For example while running SysBench OpenSolaris outperformed RHEL5 by 18% in multi-threading, while running WRF OpenSolaris 2009.06 shows 35% better memory management results over RHEL 5, another result now from MCF demonstrates 22% of Integer Arithmetics for OpenSolaris over RHEL5.
In the near future, there should be many more Benchmark results and LibMicro tests with other popular operating systems.
Well, a lot. Find below two screencasts, one focusing more on what's new on the desktop and developer site, and one screencast focused more on the datacenter and deployer.
Of course you can get an iso or usb image directly from opensolaris.com, and many other places, but if you want to upgrade from an existing OpenSolaris 2008.11 instance, here is how you can do that:
Did you ever wonder how you can contribute code, or a ready application, to the
OpenSolaris community ?
Well, with the online tool SourceJuicer, it's fairly easy.
Check out the link, there is lot of information online, and also watch this screencast on how you can use this new tool:
One of the new features or technologies is that now, OpenSolaris can run, and is supported, on UltraSPARC machines, which of course also
includes the Sun T-Series servers, with the UltraSPARC T[1,2,2+] chips.
Why is that important ?
That means you now can configure and run Logical Domains, or LDoms, on an OpenSolaris 2009.06 machine, and use this OS as control, service, or guest domain.
Watch a short demo in the below screencast, how you can use LDoms, and underlying ZFS, to very rapidly create new guest domain, or virtual machines, and therefore application services. This demo is also shown at pod # 340 during CommunityOne and JavaOne.
One of the new features or technologies is that now, OpenSolaris can run, and is supported, on UltraSPARC machines, which of course also includes the Sun T-Series servers, with the UltraSPARC T[1,2,2+] chips.
Why is that important ?
That means you now can configure and run Logical Domains, or LDoms, on an OpenSolaris 2009.06 machine, and use this OS as control, service, or guest domain.
This also means you can migrate domains (Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris 2009.06) from a machine running a Solaris 10 control domain, to machine running OpenSolaris 2009.06, and vice versa.
Finally the third (and likely final) screencast about the Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3 (VDI 3). The focus this time is how you can use it, and how you can access your virtual desktops.
Again, this builds on top of part 1 and part 2 of this little screencast series.
I hope, of course, that this is useful for people. Bear in mind though of course, actual configuration and therefore usage also depends heavily on your own technical and business decisions.
Now that my everyday work laptop is a new Toshiba Tecra M10 with OpenSolaris 2008.11 pre-installed and supported, and that part of my job is to use and promote VirtualBox, I wanted to make sure to have the latest version availlable of course.
Software like Sun VirtualBox is now made available through the /extra repository.
See here for information on how to subscribe to that.
VirtualBox has been made available there since version 2.1.4 (I believe), and that's what I had so far on my OpenSolaris laptop. But since recently, 2.2 is now available in that repository. I quickly wanted to make sure that the upgrade works properly, and it absolutely did. I created a few screenshots of the steps I took.
First, a printout about the OS version, the package repositories I subscribed to, and the currently installed version of VirtualBox:
Then, I opened the OpenSolaris Package Manager, pointed to the "extra" repository, and selected the packages for VirtualBox and the VirtualBox kernel module, and hit "Install/Update":
That took about a minute or so, and now I have the latest version installed:
Recently, I had the pleasure, together with my coworkers Mike and Joost, to have three machines available to install, configure, and play around with the new Sun VDI 3 (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3).
I plan to create three entries for this:
Sun VDI 3 (part 1 of 3): Installation
Sun VDI 3 (part 2 of 3): Configuration
Sun VDI 3 (part 3 of 3): Usage
They way installation and configuration is now implemented in VDI 3 is sweet, and very easy to do.
If you're happy and familiar with using command line, the installation is extremely easy. Still even, if you're not using command line on a Unix based system very often, it is very easy.
Plenty more informtation about VDI 3 can be found here.
See below the first screencast, focusing on the installation:
It allows you to create virtual machines that
take advantage of the massive thread scale offered by these platforms.
Create up to 256 virtual servers on one system... for free!
With LDoms 1.1, the ability to migrate a guest domain, i.e. suspend the running Solaris instance to memory, copy it to another physical CMT machine, and resume it there, was introduced.
Watch the following screencast to see how this works and can be done.
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