Category Archives: Oracle

The reports are out!

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It’s another quarter and both Gartner and IDC reports on disk storage market are out.

What does it take to slow down EMC, who is like a behemoth beast mowing down its competition? EMC, has again tops both the charts. IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Tracker for Q1 of 2012 puts EMC at 29.0% of the market share, followed by NetApp at 14.1%, and IBM at 11.4%. In fourth place is HP with 10.2% and HDS is placed fifth with 9.4%.

In the Gartner report, EMC has the lead of 32.5%, followed by NetApp at 12.7% and IBM with 11.0%. HDS held fourth place at 9.5% and HP is fifth with 9.0%. Continue reading →

ARC reactor also caches?

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The fictional arc reactor in Iron Man’s suit was the epitome of coolness for us geeks. In the latest edition of Oracle Magazine, Iron Man is on the cover, as well as the other 5 Avengers in a limited edition series (see below).

Just about the same time, I am reading up on the ARC (Adaptive Replacement Caching) that is adopted in ZFS. I am learning in depth of how ZFS caching works as opposed to the more popular LRU (Least Recently Used) caching algorithm that is used in most storage cache memory. Having said that, most storage vendors employed a modified LRU algorithm, with the intention to keep the most recently accessed pages in memory as long as possible. This is true in NetApp’s Data ONTAP (maybe not the ONTAP GX in which I have little experience) and EMC FlareOE. ONTAP goes further to by keeping the most frequently accessed pages permanently in memory. EMC folks would probably refer to most recently accessed as spatial locality while most frequently accessed as temporal locality.

Why is ZFS using ARC and what is ARC? Continue reading →

SAP wants to kill Oracle

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It’s not new. SAP has been trying to do it for years but with little success. SAP applications and its modules still very much rely on the Oracle database as its core engine but all that that could change within the next few years. SAP has HANA now.

I thought it is befitting to use the movie poster of “Hanna” (albeit an extra “N” in the spelling) to portray SAP who clearly has Oracle in its sights now, with a sharpened arrow head aimed at the jugular of the Oracle beast. (If you haven’t watched the movie, you will see the girl Hanna, using the bow and arrow to hunt a large reindeer).

What is HANA anyway? It was previously an analytics appliance in SAP HANA 1.0SP2. Its key component is the HANA in-memory database (IMDB) and it was not aimed for the general purpose, relational database market yet. Or perhaps, that’s what SAP wants Oracle to believe. Continue reading →

Gartner WW ECB 4Q11

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The Gartner Worldwide External Controller Based Disk Storage market numbers were out last night, and perennially follows IDC Disk Storage System Tracker.

The numbers posted little surprise, after a topsy-turvy year for vendors like IBM, HP and especially NetApp. Overall, the positions did not change much, but we can see that the 3 vendors I mentioned are facing very challenging waters ahead. Here’s a look at the overall 2011 numbers:

EMC is unstoppable, and gaining 3.6% market share and IBM lost 0.2% market share despite having strong sales with their XIV and StorWize V7000 solutions. This could be due to the lower than expected numbers from their jaded DS-series. IBM needs to ramp up.

HP stayed stagnant, even though their 3PAR numbers have been growing well. They were hit by poor numbers from the EVA (now renumbered as P6000s), and surprisingly their P4000s as well. Looks like they are short-lefthanded (pun intended) and given the C-level upheavals it went through in the past year, things are not looking good for HP.

Meanwhile, Dell is unable to shake off their EMC divorce alimony, losing 0.8% market share. We know that Dell has been pushing very, very hard with their Compellent, EqualLogic, and other technologies they acquired, but somehow things are not working as well yet.

HDS has been the one to watch, with its revenue numbers growing in double digits like NetApp and EMC. Their market share gain was 0.6%, which is very good for HDS standards. NetApp gained 0.8% market share but they seem vulnerable after 2 poor quarters.

The 4th quarter for 2011 numbers are shown below:

I did not blog about IDC QView numbers, which reports the storage software market share but just to give this entry a bit of perspective from a software point of view. From the charts of The Register, EMC has been gaining marketshare at the expense of the rest of the competitors like Symantec, IBM and NetApp.

Tabulated differently, here’s another set of data:

On all fronts, EMC is firing all cylinders. Like a well-oiled V12 engine, EMC is going at it with so much momentum right now. Who is going to stop EMC?

Primary Dedupe where are you?

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I am a bit surprised that primary storage deduplication has not taken off in a big way, unlike the times when the buzz of deduplication first came into being about 4 years ago.

When the first deduplication solutions first came out, it was particularly aimed at the backup data space. It is now more popularly known as secondary data deduplication, the technology has reduced the inefficiencies of backup and helped sparked the frenzy of adulation of companies like Data Domain, Exagrid, Sepaton and Quantum a few years ago. The software vendors were not left out either. Symantec, Commvault, and everyone else in town had data deduplication for backup and archiving.

It was no surprise that EMC battled NetApp and finally won the rights to acquire Data Domain for USD$2.4 billion in 2009. Today, in my opinion, the landscape of secondary data deduplication has pretty much settled and matured. Practically everyone has some sort of secondary data deduplication technology or solution in place.

But then the talk of primary data deduplication hardly cause a ripple when compared a few years ago, especially here in Malaysia. Yeah, the IT crowd is pretty fickle that way because most tend to follow the trend of the moment. Last year was Cloud Computing and now the big buzz word is Big Data.

We are here to look at technologies to solve problems, folks, and primary data deduplication technology solutions should be considered in any IT planning. And it is our job as storage networking professionals to continue to advise customers about what is relevant to their business and addressing their pain points.

I get a bit cheesed off that companies like EMC, or HDS continue to spend their marketing dollars on hyping the trends of the moment rather than using some of their funds to promote good technologies such as primary data deduplication that solve real life problems. The same goes for most IT magazines, publications and other communications mediums, rarely giving space to technologies that solves problems on the ground, and just harping on hypes, fuzz and buzz. It gets a bit too ordinary (and mundane) when they are trying too hard to be extraordinary because everyone is basically talking about the same freaking thing at the same time, over and over again. (Hmmm … I think I am speaking off topic now .. I better shut up!)

We are facing an avalanche of data. The other day, the CEO of Nexenta used the word “data tsunami” but whatever terms used do not matter. There is too much data. Secondary data deduplication solved one part of the problem and now it’s time to talk about the other part, which is data in primary storage, hence primary data deduplication.

What is out there?  Who’s doing what in term of primary data deduplication?

NetApp has their A-SIS (now NetApp Dedupe) for years and they are good in my books. They talk to customers about the benefits of deduplication on their FAS filers. (Side note: I am seeing more benefits of using data compression in primary storage but I am not going to there in this entry). EMC has primary data deduplication in their Celerra years ago but they hardly talk much about it. It’s on their VNX as well but again, nobody in EMC ever speak about their primary deduplication feature.

I have always loved Ocarina Networks ECO technology and Dell don’t give much hoot about Ocarina since the acquisition in  2010. The technology surfaced a few months ago in Dell DX6000G Storage Compression Node for its Object Storage Platform, but then again, all Dell talks about is their Fluid Data Architecture from the Compellent division. Hey Dell, you guys are so one-dimensional! Ocarina is a wonderful gem in their jewel case, and yet all their storage guys talk about are Compellent  and EqualLogic.

Moving on … I ought to knock Oracle on the head too. ZFS has great data deduplication technology that is meant for primary data and a couple of years back, Greenbytes took that and made a solution out of it. I don’t follow what Greenbytes is doing nowadays but I do hope that the big wave of primary data deduplication will rise for companies such as Greenbytes to take off in a big way. No thanks to Oracle for ignoring another gem in ZFS and wasting their resources on pre-sales (in Malaysia) and partners (in Malaysia) that hardly know much about the immense power of ZFS.

But an unexpected source coming from Microsoft could help trigger greater interest in primary data deduplication. I have just read that the next version of Windows Server OS will have primary data deduplication integrated into NTFS. The feature will be available in Windows 8 and the architectural view is shown below:

The primary data deduplication in NTFS will be a feature add-on for Windows Server users. It is implemented as a filter driver on a per volume basis, with each volume a complete, self describing unit. It is cluster aware, and fully crash consistent on all operations.

The technology is Microsoft’s own technology, built from scratch and will be working to position Hyper-V as an strong enterprise choice in its battle for the server virtualization space with VMware. Mind you, VMware already has a big, big lead and this is just something that Microsoft must do-or-die to keep Hyper-V playing catch-up. Otherwise, the gap between Microsoft and VMware in the server virtualization space will be even greater.

I don’t have the full details of this but I read that the NTFS primary deduplication chunk sizes will be between 32KB to 128KB and it will be post-processing.

With Microsoft introducing their technology soon, I hope primary data deduplication will get some deserving accolades because I think most companies are really not doing justice to the great technologies that they have in their jewel cases. And I hope Microsoft, with all its marketing savviness and adeptness, will do some justice to a technology that solves real life’s data problems.

I bid you good luck – Primary Data Deduplication! You deserved better.

Phoenix rising from OpenSolaris ashes

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I got a little nostalgic over the weekend. As I was working on Solaris 11 x86 over the past few weeks, I got a little bit peeved about how much Oracle has changed the OS.

Command like ifconfig doesn’t not appear to be very functional anymore and instead ipadm has taken over most of the configuration options. And when I working with Jumpstart (damn!), it does not work the way that I know anymore. And now AI (Automated Install) has taken over Jumpstart and I got to relearn the whole what-ca-ma-callit. Dang!

I remembered the day when Solaris x86 first came out in the early 90s. I was ecstatic because I could finally test and run Solaris on x86 platform. I could get things running at home and have fun with it. Drivers were limited then (and still is but has gotten much better) but I was happily hacking away together with other Linux distros as the open source revolution was just beginning. After I joined NetApp, things started to change and I abandoned Solaris in favour of Linux as my job, as well as my interest, were on Linux, especially RedHat. I eventually got my RHCE and completely lost touch with Solaris. By 2005, when OpenSolaris was announced under CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License), I was no longer well versed with the developments of Solaris and OpenSolaris.

Enough about my nostalgia because I am beginning to see a young phoenix (a mythical firebird) rising from the mess of what Oracle did with OpenSolaris! Since Oracle purchased Sun in 2010, Oracle has practically burned OpenSolaris to ashes. On August 13 2010, Oracle announced the end of OpenSolaris in an internal memo and it read:

Solaris Engineering,

Today we are announcing a set of decisions regarding the path to
Solaris 11, and answering key pending questions on open source, open
development, software and binary licenses, and how developers and
early adopters will be able to use Solaris 11 technology before its
release in 2011.

As you all know, the term “OpenSolaris” has been used colloquially to
refer to any or all of a collection of source code, a development
model, a web site, a logo, a binary release, a source license, a
community, and many other related things. So it’s taken a while to go
over each issue from an organizational and business perspective, and
align on the correct next step. Therefore, please take the time to
read all of the detail here carefully. We’ll discuss our strategy
first, and then the decisions and changes to our policies and
processes that implement that strategy.

If you want the entire memo (and all the fa-lah-lah that goes with it), go to Steven Stallion’s blog. Incidentally Steven Stallion was the OpenSolaris kernel developer who leaked the memo into the open.

It became pretty obvious that Oracle business suit culture and “is this going to make money?” ways were suffocating talents and innovations of the Sun engineering tribes. Some of the high profile leavers were James Gosling (father of Java) and Jeff Bonwick (father of RAID-Z and led the ZFS development team in Sun). And there were many top talents exodus within 90-120 days after the Oracle acquisition.

The key technologies that went into OpenSolaris (and Solaris) were slowly but surely deprived of their inventors’ and maintainers nourishment. These technologies were:

  • ZFS (Project Pacific)
  • DTrace
  • Zones (aka Solaris Containers, aka Project Kevlar)
  • Fault Management Architecture (FMA)
  • Service Management Facility (SMF)
  • Advanced Network Virtualization (Project Crossbow)
  • Least-privilege

and many more. Some of these technologies were already open under CDDL license but some were still very much proprietary to Sun (I mean, Oracle). It was difficult to use what was available under OpenSolaris CDDL license to rebuild again, especially when the inventors, talents and maintainers are now all scattered in companies like Delphix, Nexenta, Greenbytes, Joyent and so on .

At the end of last year, shortly before Solaris 11 was announced by Oracle, the people who are passionate about OpenSolaris (and Solaris) have got together in full force again. Dubbed “Project Illumos“, the key people who has developed for Sun convened to build a new open-source, Solaris-based operating environment. The proprietary bits that are closely guarded by Oracle are going to be either rebuilt from scratch or ported from BSD into the last OpenSolaris-kernel before Oracle killed it. That kernel was Solaris Nevada, which was supposed to be the successor of Solaris 10.

The Illumos team already has a bootable and working operating environment and new developments are going on at a frantic pace. From the words of Bryan Cantrill (father of DTrace) and now VP of Engineering at Joyent,

“illumos was not designed to be a fork,but rather an entirely open downstream repository of OpenSolaris”

And the talents congregating to the Illumos project (like moths to a flame) are super-stellar. Just have a look at this list:

  • ZFS –> Matt Ahrens, Eric Schrock,  George Wilson, Adam Leventhal, Bill Pijewski and BrendanGregg
  • SMF –> Dan McDonald and Sumit Gupta
  • DTrace –> Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, Brendan Gregg, Eric Schrock, Dave Pacheco
  • Zones & Jumpstart –> Jerry Jelinek
  • and many, many more.

KVM (the Linux kernel-based virtual machine) is being added into the Illumos operating environment, giving it the final piece of the puzzle.

I cannot help but to feel extremely proud that OpenSolaris (and Solaris) is not dead yet and it’s alive and rising. Oracle cannot lay claim to the source code and the rights of Illumos (according to Bryan Cantrill) without itself abiding to the CDDL licensing and distribution scheme that it had killed off a year ago.

And this is indeed the young phoenix rising!

Gartner 3Q2011 WW ECB Disk Storage Market

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Just after IDC released their numbers of their worldwide Disk Storage System Tracker (Read my blog) 10 days ago, Gartner released their Worldwide External Controller Based (ECB) Disk Storage Market report for Q3 of 2011.

The storage market remains resilient (for now) and growing 10.4% in terms of revenue, despite the hard economic conditions. The table below shows the top 7 storage vendors and their relation to their Q2 numbers.

 

EMC remained at the top and gained a massive 3.6% jump in market share. Looks like they are firing all cylinders and chugging like an unstoppable steam train. IBM gained 0.1% in second place as its stable of DS8000, XIV and Storewize V7000 is taking shape. Even though IBM has been holding steadily, I still think that their present storage lineup is staggered and lacks that seamless upgrade path for their customers.

NetApp, which I always terms as the “little engine that could”, is slowing down. They were badly hit in the last quarter, delivering lower than expected revenue numbers according to the analysts. Their stock took a tumble too. As quoted by Gartner, “NetApp’s third-quarter results reflect an overdependence on a few large customers, limited geographic coverage in high-growth countries and increased competition from Dell, EMC, HP and IBM in the midrange modular ECB disk array market segment.”

I wrote in my recent blog, that NetApp has to start evolving from a pure-play storage vendor into a total storage and data management solution vendor. The recent rumours of NetApp’s interests in Commvault and Quantum should make a lot of sense if NetApp decides to make that move. Come on, NetApp! What are you waiting for?

HP came back strong in this report. They are in 4th place with 10.4% market share and hot on NetApp’s heels. After many months of nonsensical madness – Leo Apotheker firing, trying to ditch the PC business, the killing of WebOS tablet, the very public Oracle-HP spat – things are beginning to settle a bit under their new CEO, Meg Whitman. In a recent HP Discover conference in Vienna, it was reported that the HP storage team is gung-ho of what they have in their arsenal right now. They called it “The 4 Jewels of HP Storage Crown” which includes 3PAR, Ibrix, StoreOnce and LeftHand. They also leap-frogged over HDS and Dell in the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant (See below).

Kudos to HP and team.

HDS seems to be doing well, and so is Dell. But the Gartner numbers tell a different story. HDS, lost market share and now shares 7.8% market share with Dell. Dell, despite its strong marketing on Compellent, could not make up its loss after breaking off with EMC.

Fujitsu and Oracle completes the line up.

My conclusion: HP and IBM are coming back; EMC is well and far ahead of everyone else; NetApp has to evolve; Dell still lacking in enterprise storage savviness despite having good technology; No comments about HDS. 

btrfs – a better butter from a better COW?

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There’s better a lot of chatter about the default file system in the recently released Fedora 16. Fedora 16 was released on November 8, 2011. For months, there were rumours that the default file system for Fedora 16 will be btrfs (btree file system, or better known as butter-FS). But after the release, the default file system of Fedora 16 is still ext4, much to the dismay of many. btrfs holds a lot of potential because in the space of less than 4 years, it has moved up the hierarchy to be one of the top file systems in the Linux ecosystem.

File systems in Linux has not seen had a knight in shining armour for the long time. The file systems kings of the Linux world were ext2/3 for the RedHat and Debian flavoured distros and reiserfs for the SuSE  flavoured distros. ext4 is now default in most Linux distros but the concept of  ext2/3/4 has not changed much since its inception decades ago.

At the same time, reiserfs  had a lot of promise as well, but its development and progress have lost it lustre after its principal developer, Han Reiser was convicted of the murder of his wife a few years ago. If you are KPC (Malaysian Chinese colloquialism, meaning busybody), you can read the news here.

btrfs is going to be the new generation of file systems for Linux and even Ted T’so, the CTO of Linux Foundation and principal developer admitted that he believed btrfs is the better direction because “it offers improvements in scalability, reliability, and ease of management”.

For those who has studied computer science, B-Tree is a data structure that is used in databases and file systems. B-Tree is an excellent data structure to store billions and billions of objects/data and is able to provide fast data retrieval in logarithmic time. And the B-Tree implementation is already present in some of the file systems such as JFS, XFS and ReiserFS. However, these file systems are not shadow-paging filesystems (popularly known as copy-on-write file systems).

You see, B-Tree, in its native form of implementation, is very incompatible with COW file systems. In fact, the implementation was thought of impossible, until someone by the name of Ohad Rodeh came along. He presented a paper in Usenix FAST ’07 which described the challenges of combining the B-Tree concept with shadow paging file systems. The solution, as he described it, was to introduce insert/remove key into the tree structure, and removing the dependency of intra-leaf linking.

Chris Mason, one of the developers of reiserfs, took Ohad’s idea and created a shadow-paging file system based on the B-Tree idea.

Traditional file systems tend to follow the idea of the Berkeley Fast File Systems. Different cylinder groups have its own inode, bitmap and disk blocks. The used space in one cylinder group cannot be shared to another cylinder group, resulting in wastage. At the same time, performance can be an issue as the disk read/head frequently have to move to the inodes to find out where the next used or free blocks will be. In a way, it looks like the diagram below.

Chris Mason’s idea of btrfs made the file system looked like this:

Today, a quick check in btrfs wiki page, shows that the main Btrfs features available at the moment include:

  • Extent based file storage
  • 2^64 byte == 16 EiB maximum file size
  • Space-efficient packing of small files
  • Space-efficient indexed directories
  • Dynamic inode allocation
  • Writable snapshots, read-only snapshots
  • Subvolumes (separate internal filesystem roots)
  • Checksums on data and metadata
  • Compression (gzip and LZO)
  • Integrated multiple device support
  • RAID-0, RAID-1 and RAID-10 implementations
  • Efficient incremental backup
  • Background scrub process for finding and fixing errors on files with redundant copies
  • Online filesystem defragmentation

And Chris Mason and his team have still plenty more to offer for btrfs. It will likely be the default file system in Fedora 17 and at the rate it is going, could be the file system of choice for RedHat, Debian and SuSE distros very soon.

There’s been a lot of comparisons between btrfs and ZFS, since both are part of Oracle now. ZFS is obviously a much more mature file system, with more enterprise features and more robust, (Incidentally, ZFS just celebrated its 10th birthday on Halloween 2011 – see Matt Ahren’s blog) and the btrfs is the rising star in the Linux world. But at this moment, the 2 file systems are set apart in their market positioning and deployment.

ZFS is based on the CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License) while btrfs is based on GNU GPL, open source licensing. There are controversies surrounding CDDL licensing scheme, while is incompatible with GNU GPL scheme.

Oracle can count itself very lucky to have 2 of the most promising and prominent COW file systems around. It will be interesting to see what Oracle will do next. As a proponent of innovation, community and sharing, I sincerely hope that both file systems will continue to thrive in Oracle’s brutal, sales-driven organization. We certainly don’t want to see controversies about dual ownership BS of Oracle and mySQL that could end in 2015.

Solaris virgin again!

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This week I went off the beaten track to get back to my first love – Solaris. Now that Oracle owns it, it shall be known as Oracle Solaris. I am working on a small project based on (Oracle) Solaris Containers and I must say, I am intrigued by it. And I felt good punching the good ‘ol command lines in Solaris again.

Oracle actually offers a lot of virtualization technologies – Oracle VM, Oracle VM Dynamic Domains, Oracle Solaris Logical Domains (LDOMs), Oracle Solaris Containers (aka Zones) and Oracle VirtualBox. Other than VirtualBox, the other VE (Virtualized Environment) solutions are enterprise solutions but unfortunately, they lack the pizazz of VMware at this point in time. From my perspective, they are also very Oracle/Solaris-centric, making them less appealing to the industry at this moment

Here’s an old Sun diagram of what Sun virtualization solutions are:

What I am working on this week is Solaris Containers or Zones. The Containers solution is rather similar to VMware’s gamut of Tier-2 Virtualization solutions that are host-based. Solutions that fall into this category are VMware Server, VMware Workstation, VMware Player, VMware ACE and VMware Fusion for MacOS. Therefore, it requires a host OS to run the Solaris Containers.

I did not have a Solaris Resource Manager software to run the GUI stuff, so I had to get back to basics with CLI, which is good for  me. In fact, I liked it even more and with the CLI, I could pretty much create zones with ease. And given the fact that the host OS is Solaris 10, I could instantly feel the robustness, the performance, the stability and the power of Solaris 10, unlike the flaky Windows hosting VMware host-based virtualization solutions or the iffiness of Linux.

A more in depth look of Solaris Containers/Zones is shown below.

At first touch, 2 things impressed me

  • The isolation of each Container and its global master domain is very well defined. What can be done, and what cannot be done; what can be configured and what cannot, is very clear and the configurability of each parameter is quickly acknowledged and controlled by the Solaris kernel. From what I read, Solaris Containers has achieved the highest level of security with its Trusted Extension component, which is a re-implementation of Trusted Solaris. Solaris 10 has received the highest commercial level of Common Criteria Certification.  This is known as EAL4+ and has been accepted by the U.S DoD (Department of Defense).
  • It’s simplicity in administering compute and memory resources to the Containers. I will share that in CLI with you later.

To start, we acknowledge that there is likely a global zone that has been created when Solaris 10 was first installed.

 

To create a zone and configuring it with CLI, it is pretty straightforward. Here’s a glimpse of what I did yesterday.

# zonecfg –z perf-rac1

Use ‘create’ to be configuring a zone

zonecfg:perf-rac1> create

zonecfg:perf-rac1> set zonepath=rpool/perfzones/perf-rac1

zonecfg:perf-rac1> set autoboot=true

zonecfg:perf-rac1> remove inherit-pkg-dir dir=/lib

zonecfg:perf-rac1> remove inherit-pkg-dir dir=/sbin

zonecfg:perf-rac1> remove inherit-pkg-dir dir=/usr

zonecfg:perf-rac1> remove inherit-pkg-dir dir=/usr/local

zonecfg:perf-rac1> add net

zonecfg:perf-rac1:net> set address=<input from parameter>

zonecfg:perf-rac1:net> set physical=<bge0|or correct Ethernet interface>

zonecfg:perf-rac1:net> end

zonecfg:perf-rac1> add dedicated-cpu

zonecfg:perf-rac1:dedicated-cpu> set ncpus=2-4 (or any potential cpus on sun box)

zonecfg:perf-rac1:dedicated-cpu>end

zonecfg:perf-rac1> add capped-memory

zonecfg:perf-rac1:capped-memory> set physical=4g

zonecfg:perf-rac1:capped-memory>set swap=1g

zonecfg:perf-rac1:capped-memory>set locked=1g

zonecfg:perf-rac1:capped-memory>end

zonecfg:perf-rac1> verify

zonecfg:perf-rac1> commit

zonecfg:perf-rac1> exit

The command zonecfg -z <zonename> triggers a configuration prompt where I run create to create the zone. I set the zonepath to list where the zone files will be contained and set the autoboot=true so that it will automatically start during a reboot.

Solaris Containers is pretty cool where it has the ability to either inherit or share the common directories such as /usr, /lib, /sbin and others or create its own set of directories separate from the global root directory tree. Here I choose to remove the inheritance and allow the Solaris in the Container to have its own independent directories.

The commands add net sends me into another sub-category where I can configure the network interface as well as the network address. Nothing spectacular there. I end  the configuration and do a couple of cool things which are related to resource management.

I have added add dedicated-cpu and set ncpus=2-4 and also add capped-memory of physical=4g, swap=1gb, locked=1gb. What I have done is to allocate a minimum of 2 CPU resources and a maximum of 4 CPU resources (if resource permits) to the zone called perf-rac1. Additionally, I have allowed it to have a capped memory of at most 4GB of RAM, with assured of 1GB of RAM. Swap space wis set at 1GB.

This resource management allows me to build a high performance Solaris Container for Oracle 11g RAC. Of course, you are free to create as many containers as long as the system resources allow it. Note that I did not include the shared memory and semaphores parameters required for Oracle 11g RAC but go ahead and consult your favourite Oracle DBA (have fun doing so!)

After the perf-rac1 zone/container has been created (and configured), I just need to run the following

# zoneadm –z perf-rac1 install

# zoneadm –z perf-rac1 boot

These 2 commands will install the zone and start the installation process. It will copy all the packages from the global zone and start the installation as per normal. Once the “installation” is complete, there will be the usual Solaris configuration form where information such as timezone, IP address, root login/password and so on are input. That will take about 20-40 minutes, depending on the amount of things to be installed and of course, the power of the Sun system. I am running an old Sun V210 with 512MB, so it took a while.

When it’s done, we can just login into the zone with the command

# zlogin –C perf-rac1

and I get into another Solaris OS in the Solaris Container.

What I liked what the fact that Solaris Containers is rather simple to understand but the flexibility to configure computing resources to it is pretty impressive. It’s fun working on this stuff again after years away from Solaris. (This was after I took my RedHat RHCE certification and I pretty much left Sun Solaris for quite a while).

More testing to be done, but overall I am quite happy to be back as a Solaris virgin again.