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One of the new features in Solaris 10 now allows Solaris Containers to be moved from one system to another -- this new feature is currently available in Solaris Express, but will soon be available in a Solaris update.

Sun has published an excellent step-by-step guide on the process of moving Solaris Containers. You can view it at:

www.sun.com/software/solaris/howtoguides/moving_containers.jsp

or alternatively download the PDF:

www.sun.com/software/solaris/howtoguides/moving_containers.pdf

Enjoy!

Sun has published an article which describes various tunables for Sun StorEdge SAN Foundation Suite -- also known as Leadville -- software. There are several areas of performance -- failover times, SCSI queue depth management, etc --
that can be optimised by judicious and careful use of certain user-tunable kernel-level variables.

This new document on sun.com presents three general matrices describing the various types of tunables and/or default values related to performance, failover times and error recovery and logging:

Type one (1) : variables may be adjusted to fit specific customer configuration requirements.

Type two (2) : variables are adjustable, but in general no adjustment is recommended. These variables need to be tuned only in very rare cases.

Type three (3) : variables are hard-coded and are not adjustable; they are presented herein for completeness only.

If you'd like to better understand the discovery, path failover and general performance tunables and values incorporated in the Leadville driver stack, simply download the PDF.

Sun has published a very nice, detailed, step-by-step guide for installing the Solaris 10 11/06 Operating System, Solaris Cluster 3.2 software, the QFS 4.5 cluster file system and Oracle 10g Release 2 RAC.

This document also provides detailed instructions on how to configure QFS and Solaris Volume Manager so they can be used with Oracle 10g R2 RAC.

The installation procedures can be used for SPARC or x64 platforms, for installations with up to eight nodes using IP over InfiniBand (IPoIB) or Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) for the private interconnect and with any level of I/O redundancy.

After you complete the procedures, you can use any combination of raw devices, Solaris Volume Manager, Automatic Storage Manager (ASM), or QFS cluster file systems to store data files.

A must-have!

» Download PDF

You may be aware that Sun has released the Solaris Cluster source code through the HA Clusters community on the OpenSolaris site. Solaris Cluster is a multi-system, multi-site disaster recovery solution that manages the availability of applications services and data across local, regional and vastly dispersed datacentres.

Sun has recorded a podcast on the the open sourcing of Solaris Cluster and how multiple parties within the ecosystem will benefit. Highlights include:

• The seeding of open source from the Solaris Cluster product, namely Open High-Availability Cluster, and binary distribution of Solaris Cluster that runs on open Solaris.
• A three-phased approach starting with agents, followed by the geographic edition (disaster recovery), and then finally, the core infrastructure.
• How open sourcing of Solaris Cluster addresses a need in the system administrator development community.
• How an open-source set of tools can stimulate better conversations between application developers and deployers about making products do what they should, when they should.
• The release of the testing infrastructure to ensure that what has been developed actually works.
• Details of the open license.

[Source: Innovating@Sun]

» Listen to Podcast (MP3)

If you're interested to learn how the Sun Fire X4500's high storage density and high throughput can solve the challenges associated with data warehousing, HPC storage cluster and media streaming -- and more -- you should definitely check the following and very informative Sun Net Talk:

[Watch] Sun Fire X4500: The First and Only Hybrid Data Server

In a recent article and accompanying screencast, InfoWorld explains why ZFS is so powerful and easy to use, and why ZFS and the Sun Fire X4500 server, codenamed Thumper, are a perfect match...

"Soon after I started working with ZFS (Zettabyte File System), one thing became clear: the file system of the next 10 years will either be ZFS or something extremely similar. The fluidity, the malleability, and the scalability of ZFS far surpass anything available now on any platform. We're talking about a file system that can address 256 quadrillion zettabytes of storage, and that can handle a maximum file size of 16 exabytes."

(Paul Venezia is senior contributing editor of the InfoWorld Test Center)

» InfoWorld Article: Sun ZFS breaks all the rules
» InfoWorld Screencast: Sun's ZFS on Thumper