In fact, the article contains a few interesting notes about zones and containers, and is a pretty good comparison of the main features of the two systems.

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.

The material is part of the Curriculum Development Resources at OpenSolaris.org and is available as PDFs for download. The documents are short and easy to read, but packed with lots of useful information and a good read for anybody interested in understanding more about the technology and functionality in OpenSolaris.

The Modular Datacenter (otherwise known as Project Blackbox) squeezes 7 or 8 racks, depending on the the configuration fits 240 or 280 Us of rackspace into a standard shipping container. The idea is that you can deploy one of these containers very quickly with your desired set up, either to handle all of your datacenter requirements (which it could), or it’s used as a quick solution for a particular project.

Interestingly, I can also see it as a potential solution for cloud computing. Not only would a one of these containers make an excellent datacenter in it’s own right, but the ability to quickly expand the capacity when you need kinda takes the idea of cloud computing and easily expanded capacity to another level.

Sun are not the only people doing these datacenters in a container though:

• HP have the POD
• IBM have their Scalable Modular Data Center
• Rackable have their ICE Cube Portable Data Center system
• Verari have the FOREST (Flexible, Open, Reliable, Energy efficient, Scalable and Transportable) Container Solution

All of them promote the density and power of the systems and, more importantly in todays climate, their energy efficiency.

In an ideal world we’d line these all up next to each other and compare them, but I hardly think that would be practical. It would, however, be interesting to see what sort of power, performance and flexibility these systems offered.

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

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

If you want to update the dynamic library loading path in Solaris 10 you must use the tool crle.

If you want to add a path, say /usr/local/lib make sure you use the -u option to update rather than replacing the existing library path info:

# crle -u -l /usr/local/lib

What’s been happening? Well Busy New Year will explain part of it.

On the Sun/Solaris front:

• Sun shipped me a new card to fit into the T1000 to get some better performance on the network interface. This was after a really good conversation with Sun about Squeezing the last drops of performance from the T1000. It arrived right between Christmas and New Year, so I haven’t had time to play with it yet.
• I’m still testing the Ultra 20M2, but let’s just say it’s cool and fast. There’s a review going out on my ComputerWorld blog soon that gives a quick overview.
• Solaris testing - I’ve been putting together some more detailed examples on using Solaris with Parallels, particularly for testing ZFS. This is particularly cool because you can play around with pools and other elements without requiring a hardware solution, and then start all over again if you muck it up.

Stay up to date with Planet MCslp.

• Managing MySQL on Solaris 10: Part 1: Introduction
• Managing MySQL on Solaris 10: Part 2: Solaris Kernel Threads Model
• Managing MySQL on Solaris 10: Part 3: Inter-process communication
• Managing MySQL on Solaris 10: Part 4: Solaris Doors and Signals
• Managing MySQL on Solaris 10: Part 6: Solaris Performance Tuning Tools 1
• Managing MySQL on Solaris 10: Part 7: Solaris Performance Tuning and Performance Monitoring Tools 2

No, I haven’t missed one out, Frank assures us that Part 5 is on the way!

I wish we had a DTrace interface to MySQL…

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.

PCI Device Support for Solaris OS on x86 Platforms

There’s just such a list on BigAdmin: Commands for Sun Studio 11 Software.

There are some gems here I wasn’t aware of, like xscapture for capturing user interface design from a running Motif/Xt application; anaylyzer for a GUI performance monitor and dmake, for distributed building.

I think I need to spend some time going through each tool on this list and finding out how best to use it.

Cool!

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.

• Step 1: Anti-Static Setup
• Step 2: Hard Drive Install
• Step 3: PCI Card Install
• Step 4: DVD Install
• Step 5: Network Connection

There’s a Solaris driver available (impressively in both SPARC binary, Solaris 7+ (direct download) and source (direct download), under a BSD-like license. The release notes are required reading too.

ATA over Ethernet is an interesting concept, albeit an expensive one at the moment, but I like the idea of remote disks, rather than remote computers. The reason is simple: in many ways it would make much more sense for those situations where you want a lot of storage, but still with direct access to the hardware you want to use it on. Traditionally you’d use NFS for that, but that would require a cheap-ish server, which seems a waste. Move the hard disks away (for noise/heat reasons) and keep the CPU and graphics interface local; video production and even large (but not necessarily fast) databases.

Now marry up ATA over Ethernet with ZFS and you could have a phenomenal ZFS pool, accessibly directly from the desktop, and without the need to keep a unit like Thumper in a cabinet next to your desk.

Shame I probably wont get the chance to try it out.