Oracle Solaris 11 Express Released!

Solaris 11 Express has finally been released! This has been a long time in coming and I'm very excited to finally see this day. Just so that folks are clear, this is a full express release with support for developers, system administrators, evaluators, enthusiasts, etc. on x86 and SPARC! It is totally free to use as long as it is not used on production. As you can see on the main link above, Oracle is selling a full suite of support for Solaris 11 Express, if you are looking for support or to use it in production. Oracle is dead serious about Solaris, so make no mistake about it!

Needless to say, I'll be busy downloading and upgrading my systems to this release. I'll make some additional blog posts once I have things in place to take it for a full spin on both x86 and SPARC. I'll leverage my Ultra 20, some VirtualBox instances, and some LDoms to make things interesting!

So what are you waiting for??? Go download Solaris 11 Express now!

Oracle Solaris Summit at LISA!

At LISA this year, there is a Oracle Solaris Summit at the conference. I wish I could be there today to attend. However, thanks to technology, we can watch this event online! This is a excellent opportunity to get a look at what's happening with Solaris 11 Express!

Update:

The slides for this summit are located here.

Agenda:

Solaris Summit at LISA10

Tuesday, Nov 9, 2010 in Ballroom A4/A5, San Jose Convention Center.

Agenda:

• 9:00 - 9:30 am - Introduction to Oracle Solaris 11 Express, by Markus Flierl
• 9:30 - 11:00 am - Image Packaging System, by Bart Smaalders
• 11:00 am - 12:30 pm - Deploying Oracle Solaris 11 in the Enterprise, by Dave Miner
• 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm - LUNCH BREAK
• 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm - Advances in Solaris Networking with Crossbow and Beyond, by Nicolas Droux
• 2:30 pm - 3:00 pm - Oracle Solaris Containers in Oracle Solaris 11 Express, by Dan Price
• 3:00 pm - 3:15 pm - BREAK
• 3:15 pm - 4:15 pm - ZFS Features in Oracle Solaris Express, by Cindy Swearingen
• 4:15 pm - 4:45 pm - New Security Features in Oracle Solaris 11 Express, by Glenn Faden
• 4:45 pm - 5:30 pm - Deploying Applications Using SMF and Other Solaris 11 Features, by Liane Praza
• 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm - Beer and Snacks Reception for ALL

Interview With Andy Bechtolsheim and My Afterthoughts

Dan Worth on V3 wrote an article about an interview with Andy Bechtolsheim who was one of the original co-founders of Sun Microsystems, who returned some years back to help design many of the servers that are deployed today from Sun Oracle. Andy has some interesting insights into Sun and the computing market in general. I do agree with him that Sun was too focused on bringing products to market for developers and technophiles instead of generating the kinds of profit it should have. And this definitely led to the need for change and why Oracle is managing things differently. Sun was too busy giving away software and technology for free and not pushing to get revenue. Oracle still gives away software, like Solaris, for free in non-production environments. But it expects payment now for production use. This has caused some flak from the user base and I have to side with Oracle on this one. Giving software away for free or open sourcing it is of course a "nice thing to do" and great for schools and start-ups. But all of that engineering work has to be paid for and of course stock holders expect a profit. Sun just wasn't making the money it should have from all of the intellectual property it had developed. I think Oracle has the right mindset. Give it away for free in non-production environments, but expect payment when used in production. To me this is perfectly reasonable.

Andy also makes a point that the way people use computers is changing. The revolution of mobile devices such as the iPhone and the iPad have truely changed the perspective on how computing should be. It should be easy and require very little effort on the part of the user or consumer. The heavy lifting should be on the back-end in a data center somewhere. And this is definitely the direction of the industry.

Recently in the OpenSolaris discussions list, the topic of UNIX workstations came up and how folks miss having a good SPARC workstation. I replied to this thread and gave my observations over the past 10 years. I think it's a good read and have included it below for you to enjoy!

I would argue that Sun lost focus on the workstation market around 2000. While it had some great workstations (Ultra 60, Ultra 80, Sun Blade 1000/2000), it was pretty clear that the focus for Sun was on building mid-range to high-end servers (Ultra Enterprise 4x00-6x000 and E10k). And in that space, pushing the Mhz up would have cost Sun on the cooling and power envolope. And with SMP on more and more sockets, Mhz wasn't a problem back then. Kinda similar to how things have been on the CMT processors until recently. Solaris was optimize to scale up and as a result, its performance on a single socket suffered. Not really a surprise if you think about it. Sun from that point on was making the lion's share from servers and not workstations anymore.

And to add to the situation, the release of the Sun Rays really helped to kill off the workstation line. Sun couldn't make a 1-2 CPU box that out performed an x86 box and Sun wanted everything in the data center anyways. Not to mention that the graphics cards, while very capable, were getting more and more expensive. When I left Sun almost 10 years ago, we were starting to deploy Sun Rays and taking everyones SPARC workstations away. In typical Sun fashion, we were eating our own dog food and making Sun Rays work right. This was the second time that Sun tried internally to deploy thin clients, remember the Java Station? But the good news is that Sun Rays worked great and the deployment worked. This led to major changes on the thinking inside Sun..

1. Pushed all the desktop workloads to the data center and enabled better remote access and work for field offices and telecommuters.
2. Reduced overhead in desktop support. I heard that it now takes less than 30 Sysadmins to manage the 30k+ Sun Rays at Sun.
3. It reinforced the vision of the data center handling everything and everyone using stateless devices (gee we're revisiting that again with mobile devices, lol)
4. It put into question the value of workstations beyond kernel and hardware engineers.

Sun Rays are still a great product and you can do a lot on them. Sun, the US Gov, lots of service desk orgs, and etc use them. I've even deployed them inside of two banks with great success.

Now on top of all this internal stuff at Sun.. you have to look at how the climate changed in the field for workstations at big organizations. There was a time when you'd walk in the Dilbert cube mazes of companies and find folks with a UNIX workstation and a PC desktop or maybe a Mac. Fast forward to about 5 years ago and most corporations decided to start out-sourcing or to downsize desktop support. As a result, they all pushed for standardized desktops and guess what? They are all windows desktops and most companies implemented a policy that if you want to use UNIX, you have to log into a box in the data center for that. So UNIX workstations, Macs, and even Linux were pushed out of the office space and back into the data center because of office policies.

I have yet to see this change, other than some folks using a Mac laptop here and there like me:) But ultimately, this is what really killed the UNIX workstation market. Corporations standardizing on Windows PC's and making it *illegal* to have anything else. And this affected not only Sun, but also IBM and HP. The UNIX workstation market just dried up. And this is also what has killed Linux as a desktop alternative.

Really at this point, the only alternative desktop that's making any progress is the Mac. The sales are up and everyone is buying iPhones and iPads. I think it's the only real chance to battle back against Windows and it's working better than even Apple thought possible.

So where does that leave folks like us who want a UNIX workstation? Up the creek, that's where! I'd love to have a quad-core CMT workstation with great 3D graphics. But it'll never happen at this point. I have an Ultra 20 and a Sun Blade 2000 that I use as servers and test gear at home. In the future, it'll probably be a Mac Pro and lots of VirtualBox instances. I don't know.

It is truly amazing to think back over the past 10 years and see how many of the ideas that were appearing inside Sun are now going mainstream. I'm very proud to have worked at Sun "back in the day" as it were and to have played my role in it. I think the days of large data centers, thin clients, and mobile devices in all shapes and sizes is indeed upon us.

Great Book on Solaris Virtualization

While I was at the Oracle OpenWorld 2010 conference, I picked up a new book called "Oracle Solaris 10 System Virtualization Essentials" which is written by Jeff Victor, Jeff Savit, Gary Combs, Simon Hayler, and Bob Netherton. This is an excellent book for systems architects, engineers, and administrators to become familiar with all of the virtualization technologies for the Solaris platform. The book covers Dynamic Domains, Oracle VM Server for SPARC (LDoms), Solaris 10 x86 Virtualization (OVM for x86, xVM Server, Xen, VMware, and Hyper-V), Solaris Containers, and Virtualbox. The book includes an excellent chapters on choosing the right virtualization technology, applying virtualization, and management. This is definitely an excellent book for folks to become familiar and get started on learning these technologies. It is amazing to think there are soo many options for virtualizing Solaris these days. I've worked extensively with Dynamic Domains, LDoms, Solaris Containers, and VirtualBox. It's great to finally see a book that can introduce one to all of the options available and give you an insight in how to apply them.

I highly recommend this book! You can pick up a copy from Amazon or other book stores. Definitely want to thank the authors for taking the time to write this book!

Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.0

The Oracle VM Server 2.0 software was released during the week of Oracle OpenWorld 2010 in San Francisco. At that conference, I presented with John Falkenthal and Honglin Su on the 2.0 release. I've uploaded the presentations to the LDoms Community site:

• Oracle VM Server for SPARC: Enabling a Flexible and Efficient IT Infrastructure, by John Falkenthal, Honglin Su, and Octave Orgeron, presented at Oracle OpenWorld 2010. (PPT)
  
• Industry View: Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.0, by Octave Orgeron, presented at Oracle OpenWorld 2010. (PDF)

The first presentation goes into detail over the 2.0 release while the second presentation gives an industry view. Unfortunately, the audio for the session has not been made available for download and contained valuable information. As such, I'll provide a brief overview of the new features in the 2.0 release:

• SPARC-T3 Support - The SPARC T3 servers (1, 1b, 2, and 4) are supported with this release.
  
• PCI-E Direct I/O - PCI-E slots can now be allocated directly to LDoms.
  
• Dynamic Memory Reconfiguration - Memory can now be dynamically allocated to LDoms. This concludes DR capable resources that are available (CPU, Cryptographic Units, Virtual Disks, and Virtual NICs)
  
• LDom Migration Enhancements - Increased performance and fewer restrictions around CPUs and Cryptographic Units
  
• Enhanced Virtual Disk Multi-Pathing - Multi-Pathing at the Guest LDom level when multiple Service Domains are used as back-ends.
  
• Unique Domain ID Tools & APIs - Unique Domain IDs for identification and asset tracking of LDoms.
  
• Enhanced CPU Allocation & Affinity - Better allocation of CPU threads to prevent cache thrashing
  
• SPARC-T3 Power Management - Power management features on the SPARC T3 servers where unused threads and cores can be powered off.
  
• P2V Conversion Tool Enhancements - Enhanced support for UFS and VxVM boot volumes.

Over the next few blog posts, I'll demonstrate these new features where possible, so that you can see the benefits of using the 2.0 release.

The OVM for SPARC 2.0 download site is ready and the updated firmware is now available. It is important to update the firmware to support the 2.0 release features. I've also updated the LDoms Community site with the links to the 2.0 documentation.