Outside the Asylum

Category: Sun & Solaris

  • Fishworks finally released

    Sun’s super-secret-squirrel storage appliance project has been under wraps for years now. We’re talking Apple style secrecy.

    About a week ago they finally launched product.  Another cool bit of news is that there is a vmware ‘simulator’ version available for download. cool.

    The “fishworks” project was rumoured to be Sun’s NetApp killer NAS appliance, based on ZFS and solaris with a nice GUI.  This turned out to be bang on.  The GUI must have been what took the most time and effort, it looks slick.  NetApp have done bugger all with their GUI. I find it very clunky.

    add Fibre Channel support, de-duplication and if the performance is good Sun might just have a winner.

    UPDATE:  I’ve just seen Sun’s stock price chart and profit/loss info over the last few years. It’s in freefall. Lets hope this new stuff isnt too little too late.

    UPDATE2: it was. Oracle bought Sun

  • ZFS and Containers

    sc_fig_11.gif

    Upside: good granular resource management. efficient disk usage.
    Downside: one Solaris kernel. shared ethernet interfaces.

    Solaris Containers ( = Zones plus Resource Management) and ZFS is pure joy, especially the ability to clone zones to save disk space. There is a bit of a gotcha though. As Solaris hasn’t got boot support for ZFS yet, there is an issue in that you cant upgrade a zone if its root is sitting on a ZFS volume. I hear that the next release of Solaris (07/07?) will have ZFS boot support and will fix this issue. Solaris Internals has lots of great info.

  • Sun Multithreaded 10 GbE Networking Card

    8178.jpeg

    Sweet!

    Maximum Ethernet transfer rate
    • 10 Gb/sec for each single port
    • 16 Gb/sec total for both ports
    Host Interface x8 lane PCI-Express 1.1
    Network Interface Two instantiations of XAUI, IEEE 802.ae, 2002 compliant
    Optics 10GBase-SR, 10GBase-LR
    IEEE 802.3ae 2002 compliant

  • Sun LDOMs on Coolthreads servers

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    I set up LDOMs on a T2000 recently to have a play and learn about them. This pdf is a good intro to LDOMs.

    Basically, the steps are; install solaris (11/06 or greater), upgrade firmware, install LDOM software, configure installed solaris instance as the first control LDOM, reboot. repeat, rinse, RTFM etc.

    A word of advice, always read release notes. I hit a bug where I could not add/remove cpus from the LDOMs I had created. big problem! After bit of googling I found the section “Dynamic Reconfiguration of Virtual CPUs with Cryptographic Units” in the release notes. Bingo.

    So I feel that LDOMs are a bit bleeding edge still. I’ll wait a bit before i start using them.