A new web-based application, Wand, enables you to easily manage LDoms. With a three-tier architecture written entirely in Java and XML, a robust architecture that leverages Sun's Cacao agent framework, and a browser user interface, Wand is enterprise-ready, secure, and well-suited for distributed management.
With Wand, you'll be able to get productive in minutes rather than days or weeks. You'll be able to see exactly how your physical and virtual machines are organized, what resources they have, and create and manage new logical domains with a simple one-click interface.
Using SourceJuicer 1.2.0 and OpenSolaris 2009.06 enabled blogger Josh Simons to upgrade the open-source package Ploticus he had earlier developed using prior iterations of those releases. He recommends having a look at "How to use OpenSolaris SourceJuicer" and a brief video demo on SourceJuicer that he incorporates in his blog.
Wanting to accommodate a tight production schedule and render more digital content in a shorter time frame, Blue Sky Studios started investigating how to expand its computing capacity for the film "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs." The studio decided to test drive Sun Blade X6250 server modules under Sun's Try and Buy program, and ended up deploying a Sun Constellation System, 120 Sun Ultra 24 workstations and Sun's Enterprise Installation Services. The solution provided four times better performance than Blue Sky's previous solution.
The ZFS Guides
Addresses Configuration, Best Practices, Tuning, Troubleshooting, Database
Solaris Internals has a selection of guides on ZFS to help educate users on several aspects of ZFS use, including ZFS Configuration, ZFS Best Practices, ZFS Tuning, ZFS Troubleshooting, and ZFS for Databases. An overview of the topics contained in each and links to these resources are provided.
An IBM article comparing AIX 6.1, Solaris 10 and HP-UX incites Blogspot host Robert Milkowski, who decides to dissect the piece, to offer his opinion and identify inaccuracies. Some of Milkowski's contentions with the article are the lack of Solaris innovations identified and comparison of ZFS to IBM's JFS2. Kudos are given to IBM's marketing strategy not only by this blog's author but by a couple of the commenters as well.
Logical Domains (LDoms) provides built-in virtualization capabilities for Sun's CoolThreads Servers. Recently released Version 2.1 provides support for:
CPU power management
jumbo frames
configuring domain dependencies
autorecovery of configurations
export of same backend multiple times
physical-to-virtual migration tool and
configuration assistant tools.
Other features and multiple bug fixes also have been implemented. LDoms 1.2 software is supported on the OpenSolaris 2009.06 release, Solaris 10 05/09 and earlier Solaris 10 patched versions.
Get to know the Sun Secure Global Desktop Software in a relatively new white paper that presents an overview of the product. The May 2009 PDF covers the software's architecture, client support, Adaptive Internet Protocol (AIP), administration and management tools, application connectivity, the server array, authentication, security, load balancing, printing, client drive mapping, copy and paste, session management and Webtop. In June, Sun released Version 4.5 of its access solution that now enables the deployment of applications on servers rather than clients, and provides the ability to manage and deliver access to Windows, Linux, Solaris, AS/400 and Mainframe systems from a single PC.
Sun HPC Software, Developer Edition 1.0 for OpenSolaris is a pre-configured, integrated development environment (IDE) to enable developers to quickly and efficiently create, debug and deploy parallel applications. Certified on OpenSolaris, it takes advantage of virtualization for easy installation and seamlessly integrates with a cloud environment for scalability. This full-featured HPC development environment is distributed as a virtual machine (VM) that is pre-configured, grid enabled and a virtual HPC cluster comprised of three OpenSolaris zones.
The Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office gives users of this office productivity suite the ability to import and export to the Open Document Format (ODF), which is an OASIS and ISO/IEC international standard. The newest version is Sun ODF Plug-in 3.1 which offers support for Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2, and the disabling of automatic registration and product updates - important to businesses with large deployments of ODF Plug-in such as enterprises and governments.
Discover what Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems and VMware vSphere 4.0 can do to ease Windows server consolidation efforts in a June 2009 white paper that specifically addresses how to fulfill storage requirements typical in virtualization initiatives. The writers cover “storage in server virtualization” to refer to storage used to support applications and operating systems that are virtualized and encapsulated in a virtual machine (the virtualized application stack) and related data (VMDK disks).
The quick start guide "Deploying Apache HTTP Web Server on Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems" by Hasham Pathan explains not only how to install the Apache HTTP Web Server but also how to invoke Web services from the storage appliance. The document includes scenarios designed to aid consolidation efforts and simplify management.
We track how frequently each article is viewed on the web site to determine which the readers consider the most important. For last week, Vol 137 Issue 1, the top 10 articles were:
While surely no one likes a recession, open-source software firms are finding an encouraging number of adoptions as the tightening economy forces companies to seek the best price point for their IT infrastructure. The Economist recently reported on the open-source sector, noting double-digit growth in the sector as a whole.
The recent SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark figures that reported outcomes of three identical Sun Netra X4250 Servers running the same software stacks but with different results are interpreted in a blog by Christopher Boire of Sun's Strategic Applications Engineering group.
Sun's Open Network Systems have set multiple record-breaking results on industry-standard Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing (BIDW) and e-mail serving benchmarks. Outstanding performance was also observed on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark and the SAS Analytics grid test.
Enabling Host Watchdog Monitoring on Sun SPARC Enterprise Mx000 Server
Sun SPARC Enterprise Mx000 servers have a domain watchdog monitoring feature that is disabled by default. The feature is also called Alive Check/Monitoring and allows the eXtended System Control Facility (XSCF) software on the system controller to detect problems and recover when a domain hangs in the Solaris OS. Find out more in this tech tip from a Sun engineer.
The Zones Update on Attach Feature and Patching in the Solaris 10 OS
Read about the 'update on attach' command (the -u argument to the zoneadm attach command), available since the Solaris 10 10/08 release. Topics include: Determining Which Packages Are Updated, Update on Attach vs. Regular Upgrade, Patching and Zone Update on Attach, Whole Root Zone vs. Sparse Root Zone, Interim Diagnostic Relief (IDR) Patches and Special Patches, and Steps for Running Update on Attach.
Although tuning with ZFS may be considered taboo by some, Neelakanth Nadgir takes on the task and shares how to get even better performance from MySQL Innodb with ZFS that includes fixing some performance bugs. There are seven tuning tips and each is explained in detail. Nadgir's blog provides details on how to do each of the tasks and offers reasons why performance will be boosted.
If you haven't tried the latest PatchFinder tool that was updated this past May, then you are in for a treat. You can still search for patches by the 6 digit base PatchID if you have it, but if you don't, you can search for patches in a variety of ways, such as recommended patches, security patches, BugID number, keyword search, general dates, and other options.
Corporate Information Security (CIS) officers currently face the daunting task of making their networks both accessible to those requiring access and inaccessible to those with no business to conduct. Sun CIS Officer Leslie Lambert offers some suggestions on how to find the right balance between access and denial.
In an attempt to let customers and partners know more about Sun's Network Equipment Provider (NEP)/Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) Sales & Industry Group, its vice president, Darrell Jordan-Smith, has invited some of the group's team members to introduce themselves and their respective divisions. The LifeCycle Solutions Group led by Kevin Palmer and the Industry Solutions Sales Group led by Don Bunker have each taken a turn and the information is posted on Jordan-Smith's blog.
A Ziff Davis educational eSeminar on Oracle's Siebel CRM 8 running on Solaris 10, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 systems and Sun Open Storage explains how these solutions can accelerate ROI payback cycles by reducing power and floorspace consumption up to 90%, while also lowering operating costs by as much as $5 million over 5 years. Targeting CXOs and other IT decision-makers, the 46-minute video also explains why upgrading to Siebel 8 can reduce maintenance costs and TCO by up to 50%.
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