Solaris OS How-to Guide for New Users
“How to Manage Systems with ZFS in Solaris Containers,” one of the Solaris 10 How To Guide series, is intended to show a new user the capabilities of ZFS when coupled with Solaris Containers. It describes the assignment of a ZFS file system to a zone, and some of the ZFS administrative tasks possible in such a configuration.
Engineer Shares Experience, Offers Advice
In a blog that deals with Windows, OpenSolaris and VirtualBox, Sun engineer Alan Hargreaves recounts his experience with loading VirtualBox and a release candidate ISO of OpenSolaris 2009.06 on his laptop. He also used the exclusive-to-Sun-employees test tool punchin. His first caution is not to attempt this install with a mere 512MB memory since the laptop shows the installation as apparently successful when it is not in fact.
Blogger Uses Single-socket UltraSPARC T2 Processor
The blog entry “Scaling Memcached: 500,000+ Operations/Second with a Single-Socket UltraSPARC T2″ explores single-instance memcached scalability for a few usage patterns. Blogger Zoran Radovic illustrates how to achieve out-of-the-box (no custom OS rewrites or networking tuning required) performance with 10G networking hardware and one single-socket UltraSPARC T2-based server with 8 cores and 8 threads per core (64 threads on a chip).
SAP Components More Available than Ever for Running on Solaris OS
Among the many software applications supported by Solaris Cluster 3.2 01/09 is support for the SAP NetWeaver stack, which Prasad Dharmavaram discusses in a recent blog post. According to the blog, Solaris Cluster software can be used to improve the availability of SAP components running on Solaris OS. Because Solaris Cluster uses redundant components to protect against any planned or unplanned downtime, there is no single point of failure in the entire stack, Dharmavaram writes.
James Gosling on Java in a Post-Oracle-Sun Acquisition World
James Gosling unburdens himself on several issues involving Java in a wide-ranging interview with eWEEK’s Darryl K. Taft, addressing among other topics Java vs. Google and what’s the outlook for Java in the Oracle business plan.
Short Items of Interest to Solaris Users
Generates Lists of Installed and Missing Patches for Solaris
The testimonials marshaled in Dr. Hung-Sheng Tsao’s blog on Patch Check Advanced (PCA) attest to the excellence and value of this command line utility for patching and support his own assertion that PCA is “…the only tool you ever need for patch management, be it on a single machine or a complete network. Just one perl script, it doesn’t need compilation nor installation, and it doesn’t need root permissions to run. It works on all versions of Solaris, both SPARC and x86.” The blog identifies the source of PCA as Martin Paul from Vienna’s Institute of Scientific Computing.
Building Mobile Infrastructure, Consumer-oriented Apps on GlassFish Mobility Platform
If you are planning your corporate mobility strategy, designing next generation mobile application architecture, or just developing device-agnostic mobile applications, then take the time to review the Sun white paper “Getting Ahead of the Trend in the Mobility Market.” The white paper briefly examines security and support cost concerns, and discusses how the GlassFish Mobility Platform can support enterprises and developers in their mobile development efforts.
Major Enhancements: SMP Support, VMs Management Capabilities
Download the freely available Sun VirtualBox 3.0 and get symmetrical multi-processing (SMP) support, meaning support for guests that have multiple virtual CPUs (vCPUs), with up to 32 vCPUs in a single virtual machine (VM). This new release also allows users to deploy, start, stop, etc., VMs within a network or datacenter for ease in management. There are additional updates and added desktop support in this latest version, which Sun identifies as “significant”.
Testing Out-of-box Network Performance
The blog Pure See takes a look at out-of-box performance of Intel Xeon 5500 processor series (Nehalem) on Sun servers running OpenSolaris 2009.06, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 and Solaris 10 Update 7 using a micro-benchmark tool uperf, which is an open source, network performance tool that supports modelling and replay of various networking patterns. The main purpose of this test is to see if a system can achieve X Gbit/s or send/receive y packets/sec after the workload is characterized.
