Archive for the ‘Solaris’ Category

How I learned to stop worrying and love dual parity RAID

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

It’s been assumed for a long time, by myself and others, that RAID 1+0 is the obvious choice for enterprise storage from a performance and reliability point of view. I’ve recently had cause to review this opinion and (re)read some articles about the subject.

Read on for links to some interesting articles and my conclusions.
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Linux zones on Solaris Express X86

Monday, January 26th, 2009

There are 3 ways to run Linux binaries on a Solaris Express X86 server.

  • xVM VirtualBox
  • xVM Server
  • Linux Branded Zone

This post takes a look at the interesting world of the Linux branded zone. I’ve posted about VirtualBox before and I hope to take a look at xVM Server (Xen) in a future post. Read on for my first steps with Linux branded zones.
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VCS Simulator

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

I’m writing some training documentation for Veritas Cluster Server (VCS). Reading through my notes I was reminded of the ‘VCS Simulator’. You can import an existing cluster config into the Simulator and use the (Windows) GUI as if it was a live cluster, changing the config, faling things over etc. It’s just the ticket for a training aid, it’s just a shame there isn’t a CLI simulator.

You can download it here (needs a Symantec login) and there’s a Flash video explaining how to import an existing cluster here.

Building a Solaris Cluster Express cluster in a VirtualBox on OpenSolaris

Friday, June 27th, 2008

I’ve been wanting to have a play around with both the Solaris Cluster Express work that’s coming out of OpenSolaris and also VirtualBox, a virtualization platform that Sun recently acquired and have moved under their xVM banner. So wanting to kill two birds with one stone I thought I’d try setting up a VirtualBox Solaris Express cluster. Here’s a run through on how to get the same thing going if you’d like to try.

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OpenSolaris 2008.05 on Mac Pro

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

Recently I posted about installing Solaris Express on a Mac Pro. This morning OpenSolaris was released, the first release of what was Project Indiana. Prior to this release the outputs of the various OpenSolaris projects were available within Solaris Express, however now they have their own distribution which has several differences notably the use of a new packaging system called IPS (Image Packaging System).

I will look further into the workings of OpenSolaris in some future posts but for now I thought I’d take a quick look at how the install ran on a bare metal Mac Pro (2006 version).

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Solaris Express Live Upgrade (Part 2)

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

A while ago I showed how I upgraded my Solaris Express system using Live Upgrade. Now it’s time to upgrade again. This time we do it a bit differently as a boot environment for the upgrade is already available. Read on for the full story.

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Solaris Express Live Upgrade

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

I’ve been having some problems establishing DomU’s with my new Solaris Express install. Before spending to much time running into issues that may have already been fixed I thought it worth while to move to the latest release. Fortunately the default Solaris Express install is ahead of me and has saved a slice for a live upgrade boot environment. Here’s my experience of moving from snv_78 to snv_81. (more…)

Solaris Express (snv_78) on Mac Pro

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

I thought it was time I gave Solaris Express a whirl on my Mac Pro (2006 version), as the bare-metal OS, rather than just virtualizing in VMWare Fusion. The main motivation for this is so I can give the xVM technologies a whirl. xVM is basically Sun’s spin of Xen. (more…)