Join us for the next Houston vBeers! Meet with local Virtualization enthusiasts and talk about technology, theory, politics of the industry or whatever else gets your propeller spinning.

Vbeers.org webpage

NO marketing blather, NO Sponsors, and NO PowerPoint but you do have to buy your own drinks!

This is a great opportunity to meet with other virtualization enthusiasts and professionals and enjoy discussing all things virtualization, and in fact anything else that comes up in conversation…

• InterContinental Houston near the Galleria, The Lobby Lounge
• 2222 W Loop S Fwy, Houston, TX 77027
• Thursday, January 26th
• 5pm to 9pm — arrive and depart any time

Relax with your technical colleagues

Please share this invitation with your IT colleagues.

Join the vBeers Houston LinkedIn group to learn about future events.

Join us for the next South Florida vBeers! Meet with local Virtualization enthusiasts and talk about technology, theory, politics of the industry or whatever else gets your propeller spinning.

NO marketing blather, NO Sponsors, and NO PowerPoint but you do have to buy your own drinks!

This is a great opportunity to meet with other virtualization enthusiasts and professionals and enjoy discussing all things virtualization, and in fact anything else that comes up in conversation…

• The Dubliner, Boca Raton, FL
• Mizner Park: 435 Plaza Real, Boca Raton FL 33432
• Wednesday, January 25th
• 5pm to 9pm — arrive and depart any time

Relax with your technical colleagues!

Free parking. Use parking lot A - Enter from US 1.

Please share this invitation with your IT colleagues.

Join the vBeers South Florida LinkedIn group to learn about future events.

In his post on dtrace.org Adam Leventhal summarizes the 10th anniversary celebration of the creation of ZFS. The post includes three videos on the subject, the first of which is with Matt Ahrens, co-creator of ZFS, who discusses the new stable ZFS interface designed for programmatic consumers of the solution. John Kennedy explains his work on the ZFS test suite, and Chris Siden of Delphix discusses his work on ZFS feature flags and Async Destroy, which allows datasets to be destroyed asynchronously in the background, which is especially helpful when gigantic datasets need to be erased, Leventhal observes.

The post Live Upgrade and ZFS Versioning concludes with the tip that one should attempt to restrict shared ZFS datasets and pools to the lowest versions supported by the oldest boot environments in use. One can always use upgrade -v to see what versions are available for use, the post suggests, and by using -o version= and -O version, users can create new pools and datasets that are accessible by older boot environments. This last bit can also come in handy when users are moving pools around systems that might be at different versions.

MySQL Enterprise Backup 3.7.0 (MEB 3.7.0) is available with several advanced features that include:

• Redo Log only Incremental Backup
• Incremental Backup without specifying LSN
• Validation of Backup Image using checksums
• Hot Backup of InnoDB .frm files
• Performance Improvements and
• Enhancements for Third-Party Media Managers

Users can download the MEB 3.7.0 package from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud web site. MySQL Enterprise customers can deploy MEB 3.7.0 immediately, while users without a MySQL Enterprise license can evaluate MEB 3.7.0 free for 30 days with the request send feedback to mysql-backup_ww@oracle.com.

The Oracle white paper "Disaster Recovery for Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud with Oracle Exadata Database Machine" deals with a subject much on the minds of users lately: disaster recovery with the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. The principles under discussion apply to deployments on an Oracle Exalogic Machine with an Oracle Database and to standalone deployments on an Oracle Exalogic Machine. Oracle Fusion Middleware Disaster Recovery -- the heart of Maximum Availability Architecture -- uses storage replication technology for disaster protection of Oracle Fusion Middleware middle tier components, supporting hot-pluggable deployments and offering compatibility with third-party vendor-recommended solutions.

Oracle's Netra SPARC T4-2 Server equipped with two SPARC T4 processors running at 2.85 GHz set a world record result of 454.52 SPECjvm2008 Peak ops/m on the SPECjvm2008 benchmark. This result surpassed the previous record, which was run on a similar product, Oracle's SPARC T4-2 server. This level of performance is 41% better than the SPARC T3-2 server and similar in performance to Oracle's SPARC T4-2 server. The Netra SPARC T4-2 server with hardware cryptography acceleration greatly increases performance with subtests using AES and RSA encryption ciphers. There are no SPECjvm2008 results published by IBM on POWER7 based systems.

Deduplication as a for primary storage tool is discussed in Carol Sliwa's searchstorage.com interview with Dave Russell of Gartner Inc. In both backup and primary storage, Russell asserts, commonality of data is the chief consideration. If an embedded technology is available for dedup use in primary storage, Russell recommends its use; if not, then an attached appliance will serve the purpose. NetApp's ability to perform deduplication/compression on primary storage data makes it attractive technology, he says. When choosing vendors consider the possible need to reinflate compressed data when using one vendor for backup and another for primary storage.

We track how frequently each article is viewed on the web site to determine which the readers consider the most important. For last week, the top 10 articles were:

• The Oracle Big Data Appliance
• Activity of the ZFS Adaptive Replacement Cache
• Ops Center 11g Update 3 Is Released
• How to Use Oracle Solaris 11 Network Virtualization and Resource Management
• New SPARC T4-Based Carrier-Grade Servers Deliver 5x Performance Boost
• Automated Diagnosis for Sun SPARC Servers Offered by My Oracle Support
• 2012 Virtualization Review Reader's Choice Awards
• Anatomizing an Oracle Solaris Binary File
• Nexenta Trashes Win8 Storage Spaces
• Oracle Database Firewall Extended to Support MySQL

The longer version of this article has list of top ten articles for the last 8 weeks.

In its latest release LibreOffice 3.4.5 includes several bug fixes and an improved level of stability. The Document Foundation, the parent organization of LibreOffice, reports that the solution won InfoWorld's BOSSIE Award 2011 as the Best of Open Source Software and the Open World Forum Experiment Award of Most-Popular Software. Downloads of LibreOffice 3.4.5 are immediately available, as are extensions.

Oracle’s Sun Fire X4800 M2, running Oracle Database 11g Release 2, achieved an x86 record of 4,803,718 transactions per minute (tpmC) with a price/performance of $.98/tpmC. The X4800 equipped with eight Intel Xeon E7-8870 processors and 4 Terabytes (TB) of Samsung’s Green DDR3 memory was nearly 3x faster than IBM's eight-processor result for a p570 and nearly 60 percent faster than the best DB2 result on IBM’s x86 server. The Sun Fire X4800 M2 delivered nearly 3x better price per TPC-C transaction than a 64-processor HP Superdome server and over 2.65x faster than HP’s best Proliant DL580 G7 score.

"PeopleSoft Oracle Virtual Machine Templates Development and Customization Guide" is an Oracle red paper intended for technical users, installers, system administrators, and programmers responsible for leveraging Oracle Virtual Machine (OVM) as a deployment infrastructure for PeopleSoft applications. It provides insight into the construction of PeopleSoft VM templates in order to help users customize and extend the delivered templates. The document can also provide guidance for the creation of VM templates needed to run on other hypervisors. The contents of the paper have not been subjected to any formal Oracle test, nor has the paper been officially reviewed.

Optimizing performance of the GlassFish Server is the topic of Rene van Wijk's post on Middleware Magic. He shows how to improve server performance by adjusting a few deployment and server configuration settings. Choosing throughput optimization as the method, van Wijk also shows how to optimize performance of the JVM. He demonstrates as well how to avoid performance constraints imposed by operating system restrictions. The post concludes with a test regime.

In his post on Solaris 11 compliance with DISA Security guidelines Jim Laurent cautions readers not to construe his comments as a declaration of compliance by either Oracle or DISA but rather a casual review of Solaris 11 against current DISA Security Guidelines. Laurent notes that an issue raised in his review a year ago has now -- with the release of Solaris 11 -- been fixed. That was the inability to mount /var as a separate file system as the scripts require. The default installation now automatically sets of /var as a separate ZFS data set, Laurent writes.

Oracle's application-tier in-memory database Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database 11g Release 2 is now available. The release incorporates significant performance and scalability improvements for real-time online transaction processing (OLTP) applications and introduces new functionality to support analytic applications with real-time in-memory data management. The solution now ships with Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management, enabling that solution to achieve significantly faster response time, higher throughput and can support more subscribers than prior releases. Furthermore, Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Exalytics will also be available for Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine as an application-tier in-memory database cache.