Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

Dell has made the source code to iDRAC6 available online, at least somewhat...You can find the code on  Dell Support . That is code only, no build environment or firmware image creation scripts as required by GPLv3. New versions of iDRAC can be found on  http://ftp.us.dell.com/esm/ . Many thanks to yo61.com for finding it and publishing it on the Dell Linux mailing list . Update: Dell gave a better working Dell Support link. Update: All official Dell DRAC manuals

Dell Community : "RHEL 6 provides SR-IOV functionality on supported hardware which provides near native performance for virtualized guests. Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) specification, introduced by PCI-SIG details how a single PCIe device can be shared between various virtualization guests. Devices capable of SR-IOV functionality support multiple virtual functions on top of the physical function. Virtual Function is enabled in hardware as a light weight PCIe function. Operating System cannot discover this function as it does not respond to the PCI bus scan and requires support in the host’s driver. As in PCIe pass-through, a Virtual function of a SR-IOV capable card can be directly assigned to the guest operating system. A virtual function driver running in the guest manages this device."

Just learned that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 has been released. Find out What's New ... And RHEL5 update 6 just went in to bèta

For some reason I had a few copies of the same GPG key in my RPM key store and removing them was tricky. Normally, you list your key using rpm -qa gpg-* and can remove them using rpm -e gpg-pubkey-12345678 . Just like anything installed with rpm, for that matter. But what if you have multiple keys? You'll get multiple matches... Easy! Just use rpm -e --allmatches gpg-pubkey-12345678 . :) Source: Red Hat archives

Like many others, we are running into issues with Oracle licensing. Oracle charges a lot for its software and using state-of-the-art hardware you may even end up paying more, rather than less. The thing is, Oracle refuses to see VMware virtualization as "hard partitioned" but instead as "soft partitioned". That is, a single core VM may run on all cores that are available to it. So Oracle licensing requires you to factor in every core. Oracle's own Oracle VM (OVM) for x86 and SPARC (Xen-based) uses hard partitioning, but this comes at the cost of loss of overcommitment. That is, you cannot assign more cores than you have and increase the CPU utilization of your hosts. This is not necessarily bad, but means you can run less VMs on a given host. Reference: Oracle Storage Guy and Weinshenker.net

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

Dell Community notified us that you can now install Ubuntu Server Edition on its servers. While they won't factory-install it and Dell support itself will not support it, Dell has worked with Canonical for the past 2 years to support it. Canonical will be offering support for Ubuntu on Dell servers. To make support easier, Dell has built a native .deb package of OMSA 6.3 on Ubuntu 9.10.