Posts tagged with: zones

I've just noticed a new PSARC case, PSARC 2010/291: zonestat, that I know a lot of people will find very very useful. To quote the summary from the PSARC: This fast-track proposes the addition of a command line tool to facilitate the observation of system resources consumed by Solaris Zones. The tool is specifically designed to observe the following: 1. Memory and cpu utilization of zones. 2. Utilization of resource control limits. 3. Resource utilization versus physical resources and versus configured limits. 4. Various cpu-related resource partitioning schemes, such as processor sets, pools, fair share scheduler, and cpu-caps. 5. Total... Continue reading ►

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 ►

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 ►

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 14 Nov 2008 - 1 Dec 2008: Replacing high-end Unix with enterprise Linux? Not so fast - It's nice to see some people are actually looking at the merits of Solaris 10 and it's Containers (aka zones with provisioning) in comparison to a Linux/VMware alternative. Ubuntu vs. OpenSolaris vs. FreeBSD Benchmarks - Interesting benchmarking of these 3 popular operating systems, and believe it or not OpenSolaris (or Slow-aris as it was once coined) does pretty well. Code Instructions: Java Performance - A good read if you still have doubts about Java's performance. Java is much much... Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 9 Nov 2007 - 22 Nov 2007: Google as a password cracker - Another good use for Google - password cracking. Ok, it's not true passpord cracking, but rather MD5 hash pattern matching. Cloud Computing Infrastructure for Facebook Developers on Dell Servers. What does it mean? - I'm a very disappointed in Sun here. Joyent are probably the best known OpenSolaris users, and yet Sun couldn't pull finger and treat them with the care they deserve. Come on Jonathan, sort it out. Porting Open Source Java to Leopard - Wow. That didn't take long and is... Continue reading ►

Sun has released Solaris 10 8/07 (aka update 4) into the wild. You can grab a copy for yourself from the download site. There are a lot of enhancements and some new functionality in this release. Most notably IP Instances, so each of your zones can have their own IP stack, and Branded Zones, which allows you to install CentOS 3.5-3.8 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.5-3.8 inside a non-global zone, and then run Linux userland applications (list of applications reported to work), unmodified, within a zone on your Solaris host. You can find a full list of changes... Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 3 August 2007: HOWTO: Move a Solaris Containers How To Guides - Details how to move a container from one host to another using functionality already in Solaris Express and due in Solaris 10. HOWTO: Managing ZFS in Solaris 10 Containers - A basic guide that demonstrates the use of ZFS in conjunction with Solaris Containers (zones). HOWTO: Solaris Live Upgrade How-To Guide - Details how to use Live Upgrade to upgrade the OS or apply patches with the least amount of downtime, and chance of corruption or data loss. HOWTO: How to Configure and Run... Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 1 April 2007 - 8 April 2007: ZFS committed to the FreeBSD base. - Solaris, FreeBSD and soon OS X, who's next? I See You! snoop(1M)'ing in non-global zones! - A great article on using snoop within a non-global (local) zone. Take special note of the warnings as you may inadvertently allow someone to snoop traffic you don't want them to. Marvell gets [SIC] on Sun's NIC - That didn't take long. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come - who knows, one day we may be seeing "Solaris Inside" stickers on products. Crack... Continue reading ►