Solaris 10 users worlwide

See this map - cool. From Jonathan blog entry:

Each pink dot represents a connected Solaris 10 user - not a downloader, but an individual or machine (independent of who made the server) that connects back to Sun's free update service for revisions and patches - applied to an individual machine, or a global datacenter. This doesn't yet account for anywhere near all Solaris 10 downloads, as most administrators still choose to manage their updates through legacy, non-connected tools. But it's directionally interesting - and shows the value of leveraging the internet to meet customers (new and old).

Sun Cluster 3.2

Finally Sun Cluster 3.2 is out. You can download it here for free. Just to highlight it - SC3.2 supports ZFS so you can for example build HA-NFS with ZFS and it works like a charm - I've been running such configs for months now (with SC3.2 beta). Also I know people generally don't like to learn new CLIs but in case of new SC it's worth it - imho it's much nicer. Additionally thanks to Quorum server it's now possible to setup cluster without shared storage - could be useful sometimes. Documentation is available here.

NEW FEATURES

Ease of Use
* New Command Line Interfaces
* Oracle 10g improved integration and administration
* Agent configuration wizards
* Flexible IP address scheme

Higher Availability
* Cluster support for SMF services
* Quorum server
* Extended flexibility for fencing protocol
* Greater Flexibility
* Expanded support for Solaris Containers
* HA ZFS - agent support for Sun's new file system
* Extended support for Veritas software components

Better Operations and Administration
* Dual-partition software update
* Live upgrade
* Optional GUI installation

With Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition, new features include:
* Support for x64 platforms
* Support for EMC SRDF replication software

Solaris Cluster is supported on Solaris 9 9/05 and Solaris 10 11/06.

Sun Download Manager

Recently I've noticed in Sun Download Center that I can download files the old way using save as in a browser or I can use Sun Download Manager directly from web page as JavaWS - I tried it and I must say I really like it - you just check which files you want to download and start SDM (from web page) and files are immediately being downloaded. It offers retries, continue of retrieval not completely downloaded files, automatically unzipping zipped files, proxy servers. All of it is configurable of course.

However I have my wish list for SDM:

• ability to download files in parallel (configurable how many streams)
• ability to not only unzip files but also to automatically merge them (great for Solaris and/or SX downloads)
• option to ask for download directory when new downloads are being added
  

LISA - follow up

It was my first time at LISA conference and I must say I really enjoyed it. There were a lot of people (over 1100 according), almost all sessions I attended to were really good. Not all of them were strictly technical but they were both humorous and informative. I had also opportunity to talk to other admins from large data centers which is always great as you can verify what other smart people are doing in their environments, often much larger than yours, and compare to what you are doing. It's always good to see and hear what other smart people have to say. I hope I'll go to LISA next year :)

So after my short vacations and attending to LISA I'm full of energy :) Well, me and Andrzej decided to start thinking about next Unix Days. I guess I'll write something more about it later.

Availability Suite goes into Open Solaris

I was going thru several OpenSolaris mailing groups and spotted really great news on storage-discuss list - entire Availability Suite is going to be integrated into Open Solaris next month! It means it will be free of charge, source will be available, etc. For most people it means mature solution for remote replication (synchronous and asynchronous) on a block level. Below quoted post:

"[...]

As the Availability Suite Project & Technical Lead, I will take this
opportunity to say that in January '07, all of the Sun StorageTech
Availability Suite (AVS) software is going into OpenSolaris!

This will include both the Remote Mirror (SNDR) and Point-in-Time Copy
(II) software, which runs on OpenSolaris supported hardware platforms of
SPARC, x86 and x64.

AVS, being both file system and storage agnostic, makes AVS very capable
of replicating and/or taking snapshots of UFS, QFS, VxFS, ZFS, Solaris
support databases (Oracle, Sybase, etc.), contained on any of the
following types of storage: LUNs, SVM & VxVM volumes, lofi devices, even
ZFS's zvols. [...]"

"[...]

The SNDR portion of Availability Suite, is very capable of replicating
ZFS. Due to the nature of ZFS itself, the unit of replication or
snapshot is a ZFS storage pool, not a ZFS file system. The relationship
between the number of file systems in each storage pools is left to the
discretion of the system administrator, being 1-to-1 (like older file
systems), or many-to-1 (as is now possible with ZFS).

SNDR can replicate any number of ZFS storage pools, where each of the
vdevs in the storage pool (zpool status ), must be configured
under a single SNDR I/O consistency group. Once configured, the
replication of ZFS, like all other Solaris supported file systems, works
with both synchronous and asynchronous replication, the latter using
either memory queues or disks queues.

This product set is well documented and can seen at
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs?p=coll%2FAVS4.0
The current release notes for AVS 4.0 are located at
http://docs.sun.com/source/819-6152-10/AVS_40_Release_Notes.html

More details will be forthcoming in January, so please keep a look out
for Sun StorageTech Availability Suite in 2007![...]"

Entire thread here.

Solaris 10 11/06 (update 3)

Finally long awaited update 3 of Solaris 10. I've just put it on x4500 box.