Laptop Solaris

Inspired by a recent discussion on Xen Discuss about what different virtualization solutions were available from Sun I thought I’d take the information provided by Volker A. Brandt and Bernd Schemmer and put it into a convenient table.

Footnotes
(1) with CPU assistance for “full” virtualisation
(2) experimental Linux/BSD (?) support

Actually, Sun have a pretty good summary, but some of the technologies are hidden behind the hardware on which they run, for example LDOM is a firmware-level solution built into many of the SPARC hardware solutions.

As Solaris gets more and more popular I’m seeing more and more people running Solaris on a laptop as their primary operating system. I’ve even got friends who have migrated over completely to Solaris from Linux. I’ve been using it for years and managed to tolerate some of the problems we had in the early days, but today it works brilliantly on many machines.

I came across this article on BigAdmin, it’s old, but a lot of the information is still perfectly valid.

Read Resources for Running Solaris OS on a Laptop

So yesterday I mentioned the new Dell T105 I got on special offer. Setting up Solaris 10 on this new machine is a little more complex than I would have wanted, but it’s now up and running fine.

Here’s what I did to get Solaris b81 working:

1. SXDE b81 has a bug in that SATA CD-ROM/DVD-ROMs aren’t identified properly, so you need to use an older version (pre-b79 it seems) and then upgrade. So:
2. Install SXDE/SXCE b78 or earlier (I actually used Solaris Express 9/07, which is based on b70)
3. Install LiveUpdate
4. Install a second instance of the OS and enable it
5. Boot into the second instance
6. Perform a live update of the original installation
7. Re-enable the original install
8. Install the Broadcom Ethernet drivers from here if you want the built-in network driver to work (it wont be good enough for xVM because only legacy support is available).

That’s it - for full xVM I disabled the internal Ethernet card and then added a Realtek-based PCI Ethernet card and it works fine. I’m now in the process of setting up some additional domains (Gentoo, Windows).

I’m getting really deep into ZFS at the moment as I try and work out how best to use it in different environments and how it affects and alters performance on different loads.

I’ve across some great ZFS resources, new and old, and blog posts surrounding using ZFS:

• Second Installment of Our Series on ZFS
• New BigAdmin XPert Session on ZFS
• Ben Rockwood: Streamlining Zone Creation Thanks to ZFS Integration
• Ben Rockwood: ZFS within a Zone: Using Datasets
• Eric Schrock: New ZFS Features

For performance tuning there’s a great guide on the Solaris Internals Wiki which reads a lot like a ‘Don’t do this…’ guide, but has some useful tips too: ZFS Evil Tuning Guide.

And if you want to know about the comparison between hardware RAID and ZFS in terms of performance, Robert Milkowski has two posts on benchmarks: Part 1 and Part 2.

I got a really good deal on some Dell servers. The T105’s were on special offer starting at just 99GBP, and even with 3-year support contracts and 4GB RAM I managed to get both for less than 500 GBP (+VAT). That’s a pretty good price for four cores of 64-bit computing.

The plan is to put Solaris b81 and xVM on at least one of these, and either Solaris or Linux on the other.

The main reason behind that is to get on top of some Solaris and Linux development work, but also to try and do some heavier testing on these platforms and try out some scalability solutions like DRBD and memcached. I’m hoping that as a testing environment, this solution will work out better from a performance and practicality point of view than using Parallels or VMware to run the test hosts.

Want to know whether your machine is capable of running Solaris?

I came across the Sun Device Detection Tool, a Java application that you can run straight from the browser (it’s a JNLP app) that will check the devices on your machine and then compare that against the devices known to work and then tell you if your hardware is going to be OK.

Sun say you don’t have to use the tool if your system is listed on the HCL, but I’ve found it to be a pretty useful for checking all sorts of machines even they are listed.

For a more detailed overview, Dennis Clarke has a detailed look at the 1.2 version here. The 2.0 release is the current one.

Not exactly a laptop, I reviewed Sun’s Ultra 20M2 desktop last year and completely forgot to mention it.

I loved the machine (it was fast, well configured and well put together) and I almost purchased my very own, until I got an alternative option just last week (of which more later). It wasn’t available at the time, but a reasonably priced and fully specced machine would make a wonderful xVM host.

Read the review at Free Software Magazine, where you can find out what I liked about the Sun Ultra 20M2.

Sun have announced a series of new servers and workstations, just as I finish up testing of the T1000 and begin testing of the Ultra 20M2.

The key elements are:

• An updated version of the T2000 servers under the Netra brand, designed for the needs of the telecommunications industry
• An improvement to the T1000 to improve reliability (by 23%) and boost disk performance by up to 300%
• New Ultra 25 workstation provides a 300% improvement in performance, designed for Java development

There’s a more detailed press release and a brief summary at Computerworld.

Sun have released an updated list of PCI devices for Solaris x86; check this if you plan to run Solaris on your PC.

PCI Device Support for Solaris OS on x86 Platforms

Sun have very kindly me a sun Ultra 20M2 to test. I’ve only had it a few days, and already I’m hooked.

The spec of the unit they have sent me is:

• 1 AMD Opteron Model 1218 Processor (Dual Core)
• 4GB RAM
• 250GB SATA HD
• NVIDIA Quadra FX 3500 Graphics Card
• 20″ TFT LCD

The LCD monitor is superb, and highly recommended; I’ve been using an identical for years, as the Sun unit is a rebadged 20″ NEC unit (my NEC 2070NX only differs by the inclusion of a USB hub).

In use the machine is fast and very responsive. Raw computing power is available if you want it, but the dual core approach means that using the machine, even when compiling something in the background, remains just as responsive.

For an example of the raw power, I did a very simple test of building the 5.1 version of the MySQL Reference Manual in PDF format. This is a consuming process, as it converts the XML into FO (through XSLT) and then uses Apache’s FOP took to translate the FO into a PDF.

• Apple Mac Book Pro (2.16GHz Intel Core Duo): 13 minutes, 2.921 seconds
• Apple iMac (1.83GHz Intel Core Duo): 13 minutes, 26.779 seconds
• Sun Ultra 20M2 (2.8 GHz Opteron Model 1218 Dual Core): 8 minutes, 32.033 seconds

Full reviews, breakdowns, performance testing and other more detailed thoughts as time goes on.