Posts tagged with: solaris

As promised on Friday, I've taken the plunge and tested applying the latest patch cluster to a fresh Solaris 10u5 installation running 10 zones using the new zones parallel patching feature. To speed things up and to try and prevent any problems I performed the following steps: Jumpstarted the OS (SUNWCuser cluster) Applied patches 125555-04 and 119254-66 (gives us the parallel functionality) Created a basic sparse-root zone without any networking Cloned the zone 9 more times Create an alternate BE using live upgrade so I had two identical boot environments Once I had the machine setup, I booted into single user mode (so all zones will be in the "installed" state) and set off the first cluster installation using the default options (ie no parallel application). I then rebooted into single user mode on the alternate boot environment, set num_proc to 10 and applied the patch cluster again. How's this for a significant difference in time: Continue reading ►

If you're running a fair few non-global zones on Solaris 10, you'll know full well how painfully slow the patching process is. Well, I'm please to say "not any more". The Zones Parallel Patching feature was officially released on Tuesday and is contained in the latest Solaris 10 patch utilities patch, 119254-66 (SPARC) and 119255-66 (x86). Getting the functionality is simple: just apply the patch as you would any other patch. Taking advantage of it is a different thing. By default the behaviour is as before: NO parallel patching takes place. But it's easily changed by setting "num_proc" to the number of non-global zones to be patched in parallel in the /etc/patch/pdo.conf file. Prior to this feature, each non-global zone was patched sequentially. With this feature invoked, the global zone continues to be patched first, but then the non-global zones can be patched in parallel, leading to significant performance gains in patching operations on zones systems. While the performance gain is dependent on a number of factors, including the number of non-global zones, the number of on-line CPUs, the speed of the system, the I/O configuration of the system, etc., a significant performance gain (up to 300% has been reported) can be expected for patching the non-global zones. Continue reading ►

I think one of the best features of Solaris is the Live Upgrade mechanism. This really useful feature can be used for upgrading and patching with very little impact on the server. This means you can patch or upgrade your production system, whilst it's still in production, and only schedule a short outage for the reboot needed to activate the new patched/upgraded environment. Live upgrade also has the added benefit that you can roll back to a known good boot environment in the event something goes wrong. Sadly, it's not always a bed of roses when it comes to using live upgrade as things change with patches and new bugs are discovered and fixed, however most problems can be easily avoided with a little bit of pre-planning. Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 12 May 2009 - 1 Jun 2009: Sun Security Toolkit at OpenSolaris.org - The SST (aka JASS) is now open source (under CDDL) and available for OpenSolaris too. Parallel Patching for Solaris 10 - Chris Armes's Weblog - This is a godsend if you've got a system with a lot of zones that needs patching. You can expect patch for patchadd for this sometime in June so you can get parallel patching before S10u8 What's New in OpenSolaris 2009.06 - The presentation slides used by Peter Dennis at Community One Sun seeks to build world's biggest... Continue reading ►

This one made us laugh today: someone made a silly mistake and removed execute permissions from chmod(1M). Oooops. Thankfully, it was on Solaris so it's easy enough to rectify thanks to "pkgchk -f".

Updating the firmware on an Ultra 20 is a really simple matter: download the "Tools and Drivers" ISO image, burn it to DVD (as it's about 1.3GB), boot from the DVD and select option 2 to perform the update. However, it very quickly becomes way more complicated if you don't have a DVD burner or spare DVD-R, or even a DVD drive. So what other option do you have? Boot CD? Yes, but its way too complicated for the time and effort. Boot Network? Ditto. Boot USB? Bingo!!! Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 25 Mar 2009 - 2 Apr 2009: Toshiba OpenSolaris Laptops - You can now get your hands on the much touted Opensolaris Toshiba laptops. Sadly, it#039;s US only at the mo with UK availability expected sometime in May 2009. I guess I#039;ll have to wait a bit, but it#039;ll be good to start hearing the reviews to see how these things run. Accelerated Patching of Zoned Systems - Woohooo!!!! Patching of systems with zones is about to get a lot quicker. Jeff provides some good data here just to whet your appetite in anticipation of the... Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 15 Mar 2009 - 24 Mar 2009: Internet Archive to unveil massive Wayback Machine data center - Oooo, and it#039;s in a Sun Modular Datacentre (aka Project Blackbox) running Solaris 10 and ZFS. The 'IBM buys Sun' story | Paul Murphy | ZDNet.com - Interesting point of view on what#039;s happening with these rumours. The last paragraph in this article could be the deal breaker though. Heat Map Analytics - Brendan Gregg and Bryan Cantril have far too much free time. The end of this article has a interesting bit about writing a program that generates... Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 13 Feb 2009 - 10 Mar 2009: Speeding to a Halt - Wow!!! OpenSolaris shutdown taken from about 41 seconds to a mere 7. Brilliant work here by Dan Price. Anatomy of Storage on the GRID - First Joyent, now MediaTemple. It's great to see large, popular ISPs moving across to OpenSolaris and ZFS to power their grid, hosting and storage offerings. HP Joins Solaris Community (Live Free or Die) - This is brilliant news, for Sun and all those HP customers running Solaris (and I know of some big banks on this list). Now I... Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 6 Jan 2009 - 29 Jan 2009: iWeb acquires the Sun Storage 7410 for its storage area network - It#039;s nice to see companies starting to promote the fact they#039;ve switched from a proprietary storage system to the Sun Storage 7000 range. Understanding ZFS: Disk Space Discrepancies - I#039;ve seen this discrepency before, but haven#039;t had the time to research it. Thanks to Ben, I don#039;t have to. Definitely worth remember this one. IPMP Re-architecture is delivered - A great introduction to the re-architected IPMP including examples of the old and new configuration styles. Once OpenSolaris... Continue reading ►