A Platform for Making Use of Physical and Virtual Sun Environments
Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center is the newest addition in the Oracle Enterprise Manager family. It is used to manage both physical and virtual systems, and manages across the entire system lifecycle from discovery to provisioning, updating, monitoring and management.
Highlights on Ops Center Capabilities in Handling Zones
Sun Ops Center 2.5 offers enhanced support for virtualization solutions such as Solaris Zones. Owen Allen briefly highlights what users can do with Zones in the latest release of this comprehensive management software for physical and virtual systems. This includes managing, monitoring and working with both global and local Zones.
Users Can Consolidate Solaris 10 Production Environments onto OpenSolaris Machines
The first phase of Solaris 10 Branded Zones (otherwise known as Solaris 10 Containers) was successfully integrated into OpenSolaris build 127 in late October of this year, reports Jordan Vaughan in his blog. These Zones, he explains, enable users to host environments from Solaris 10 10/09 and later inside OpenSolaris Zones. These Zones are being developed so that users can consolidate their Solaris 10 production environments onto machines running OpenSolaris and take advantage of many innovative OpenSolaris technologies (such as Crossbow) within such environments.
Mapion Achieves 99.999% Availability with Sun Technologie
The Japanese online map search service Mapion recently standardized its systems environment on Sun, running Solaris 10 and deploying Sun servers, Sun StorageTek 9985V system for storage, and Solaris Containers to improve performance in its data center. Mapion Mobile leveraged MySQL Cluster Database to create a database with 99.999% availability; while Mapion BB for its broadband users deployed open source technology using the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server to reduce application management time.
What It Is and What Are Its Newest Features
Solaris Cluster is a multi-system, multi-site disaster recovery solution that manages the availability of application services and data across local, regional and vastly dispersed datacenters. Solaris Cluster 3.2 11/09 is the third update for this version and brings extended support for virtualization with more options for Solaris Container Cluster, failover Solaris Containers and LDoms, new file system and volume management choices, improved Scalable Services support and new replication solutions for Campus Cluster and Geo Cluster deployments.
Depends on the OS, Apparently
Curious about the impact of virtualization on benchmarking results? Jan Brosowski blogged in SAPonSun about testing two “half-box” virtual machines on the same box. He discovered a striking difference.
Presentations from OSCON, July 2009 
A series of OpenSolaris security videos presented during the Open Source Conference (OSCON) held in July are available for viewing. Topics covered include Solaris privileges, the cryptographic framework, Solaris Containers, and a general question and answer session on security involving OpenSolaris.
Solves Consolidation and Utilization Issues, and Then Some 
In Aparna Kumar’s experience with startups, a universal goal when considering their IT environment is getting better utilization of their computing resources. Virtualization is a common solution. Along this line of thinking, Kumar wants readers of his blog to consider that a company might want to look into changing their operating system to Solaris in order to meet this goal and then some - “without cost, without performance overheads and with ease of configuration & management.”
White Paper Presents Virtualizing with Sun CMT Solutions
This new white paper addresses issues many datacenters are currently facing - how to lower TCO while supporting more customers and reducing time to market for new services. This Sun white paper describes some Sun solutions and their technologies, including Sun Blade T6340 and T6320 Server Modules, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440, T5240, T5140, T5220, and T5120 Servers, Sun Logical Domains, and Solaris Containers, to demonstrate the business benefits of consolidating enterprise applications onto Sun CMT rackmount and blade servers.
RAS Values Increase with These Solutions 
The Sun white paper “Maximize IT Uptime by Utilizing Dependable Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 Servers” explains why deploying those servers can help support organizational efforts to achieve high IT service uptime goals. The authors contend the features of these servers, identified as a low component count, extensive data integrity features and superior energy efficiency, promote reliability. In addition, redundant components foster high levels of availability, and Integrated Lights Out Management (ILOM) and self-healing features simplify serviceability.
