Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

Uptake of native Linux ZFS port hampered by license conflict . But other than that, ZFS may soon arrive on Linux. See also ZFS Fuse .

Oracle's Virtualization Blog informed me that they've expanded the use of Oracle VM (OVM) significantly by supporting visualization on the SPARC platform. "Oracle VM Server for SPARC, previously called Sun Logical Domains, leverages the built-in SPARC hypervisor to subdivide supported platforms' resources (CPUs, memory, network, and storage) by creating partitions called logical (or virtual) domains. Each logical domain can run an independent operating system. Oracle VM Server for SPARC provides the flexibility to deploy multiple Oracle Solaris operating systems simultaneously on a single platform. Oracle VM Server also allows you to create up to 128 virtual servers on one system to take advantage of the massive thread scale offered by the CMT architecture."

An interesting read from Slashdot mentioned a company YippieMove who switched from VMware to FreeBSD Jails when their infrastructure ran into so many problems doing I/O that something had to change. Interestingly, BSD Jails resembles Solaris' Zones and Linux vservers . Bottom-line is that, as the comments mention very well, you have to “know your workload before picking the technology.” Also, which hardware generation you run VMware on has a big impact. Newer hardware has a significantly better support for virtualization when compared to older generation hardware. We've had similar I/O problems with NFS shares exported to various bare metals (BMs) and VMs and we choose to move to an ECM NAS instead (based on the number and the volumes of the shares). I doubt installing vSphere 4 on our old PowerEdge 2950 would make any difference as the old hardware is simply already stretched to its limits.

Drizzle : "The Drizzle project is building a database optimized for Cloud and Net applications. It is being designed for massive concurrency on modern multi-core architecture. The code is originally derived from MySQL."

We are trying to create some common ground between Solaris and Linux environments. For example, auto mounting scripts of NFS file systems. One issue was that Sun uses the master map file called auto_master whereas Linux defaults to auto.master . Thankfully, you can tweak /etc/sysconfig/autofs and use MASTER_MAP_NAME to tell Linux to also use auto_master . Problem solved! Update: dont' forget to open /etc/nsswitch.conf and edit the line for autofs . I had to delete nisplus .

CollabNet has released binaries of Subversion 1.6.1 for all major platforms: Windows, Linux, Solaris and OS X. The Windows client is also already updated, other should follow soon. SVN 1.6 is a big step forward in the area of collaborative development as merging has been improved over 1.5 and very much so from 1.4. More tools building upon SVN are also appearing, expanding the functionality of the plain SVN server with things like ALM , Agile support and more.

Slashdot : "Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt." Note: Oracle's server is currently Slashdotted. LOL

I'm back from a 3 week vacation, so that explains the radio silence here. This year we'll upgrade from OEL 4.5 to OEL 5.x, upgrade OEM to OEM 10.2.4 and start using Oracle RAC on our Dell Poweredge 2950 servers. We'll also upgrade to ESX 3.5 everywhere and use EMC Networker backups. And finally, management of some serious Sun hardware (T2000, M5000, M9000) will fall under our responsibility so all our deployment scripts will be updated to fit that platform as well. Lots of other minor tweaks coming up too, so it should be an interesting year again. Subversion is almost fully integrated and we've been working towards release cycles for this year, to help streamline releases management and new features.