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  • The first Oracle Solaris 11 book is now available

    - by user12608550
    The first Oracle Solaris 11 book is now available: Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration - The Complete Reference by Michael Jang, Harry Foxwell, Christine Tran, and Alan Formy-Duval The book covers the Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 release; although the next OS release will be available soon, the book covers major topics and features that are not expected to change significantly. The target audience is broad, and includes Solaris admins, Linux admins and developers, and even those somewhat unfamiliar with UNIX. The coauthors include practitioners and developers from outside of Oracle, emphasizing their field experience using Solaris 11. The book complements the extensive Oracle Solaris 11 Information Library, and covers the main system administration topics of installation, configuration, and management. More Oracle Solaris 11 info here

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  • Brendan Gregg's "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud"

    - by user12608550
    Long ago, the prerequisite UNIX performance book was Adrian Cockcroft's 1994 classic, Sun Performance and Tuning: Sparc & Solaris, later updated in 1998 as Java and the Internet. As Solaris evolved to include the invaluable DTrace observability features, new essential performance references have been published, such as Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris (2006)  by McDougal, Mauro, and Gregg, and DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD (2011), also by Mauro and Gregg. Much has occurred in Solaris Land since those books appeared, notably Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010 and the demise of the OpenSolaris community. But operating system technologies have continued to improve markedly in recent years, driven by stunning advances in multicore processor architecture, virtualization, and the massive scalability requirements of cloud computing. A new performance reference was needed, and I eagerly waited for something that thoroughly covered modern, distributed computing performance issues from the ground up. Well, there's a new classic now, authored yet again by Brendan Gregg, former Solaris kernel engineer at Sun and now Lead Performance Engineer at Joyent. Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud is a modern, very comprehensive guide to general system performance principles and practices, as well as a highly detailed reference for specific UNIX and Linux observability tools used to examine and diagnose operating system behaviour.  It provides thorough definitions of terms, explains performance diagnostic Best Practices and "Worst Practices" (called "anti-methods"), and covers key observability tools including DTrace, SystemTap, and all the traditional UNIX utilities like vmstat, ps, iostat, and many others. The book focuses on operating system performance principles and expands on these with respect to Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS are cited), and to Solaris and its derivatives [1]; it is not directed at any one OS so it is extremely useful as a broad performance reference. The author goes beyond the intricacies of performance analysis and shows how to interpret and visualize statistical information gathered from the observability tools.  It's often difficult to extract understanding from voluminous rows of text output, and techniques are provided to assist with summarizing, visualizing, and interpreting the performance data. Gregg includes myriad useful references from the system performance literature, including a "Who's Who" of contributors to this great body of diagnostic tools and methods. This outstanding book should be required reading for UNIX and Linux system administrators as well as anyone charged with diagnosing OS performance issues.  Moreover, the book can easily serve as a textbook for a graduate level course in operating systems [2]. [1] Solaris 11, of course, and Joyent's SmartOS (developed from OpenSolaris) [2] Gregg has taught system performance seminars for many years; I have also taught such courses...this book would be perfect for the OS component of an advanced CS curriculum.

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  • New Cloud Security Book: Securing the Cloud by Vic Winkler

    - by user12608550
    It's rare that I read a technical book straight through; I usually read key chapters and save the rest for later reference. But Winkler's book, written by an accomplished and highly experienced security professional, was worth a complete read, cover to cover. Of the recently published cloud security books, such as... Cloud Security and Privacy: An Enterprise Perspective on Risks and Compliance, by Tim Mather, Subra Kumaraswamy, and Shahed Latif; O'Reilly Media Inc, 2009; Cloud Computing: Implementation, Management, and Security, by John Rittenhouse and James Ransome; CRC Press 2010; Cloud Security: A Comprehensive Guide to Secure Cloud Computing, by Ronald Krutz and Russell Vines; Wiley Publishing Inc, 2010 ...Securing the Cloud is the most useful and informative about all aspects of cloud security. Clearly, through his experience, the author has thought through many practical issues of securing large, virtualized IT installations. His Chapter 6 on Best Practices and Chapter 9 with its valuable checklists are worth the price of the book. If you are among the many new cloud computing professionals, Securing the Cloud is an essential reference for your work.

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  • What's a "Cloud Operating System"?

    - by user12608550
    What's a "Cloud Operating System"? Oracle's recently introduced Solaris 11 has been touted as "The First Cloud OS". Interesting claim, but what exactly does it mean? To answer that, we need to recall what characteristics define a cloud and then see how Solaris 11's capabilities map to those characteristics. By now, most cloud computing professionals have at least heard of, if not adopted, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Definition of Cloud Computing, including its vocabulary and conceptual architecture. NIST says that cloud computing includes these five characteristics: On-demand self-service Broad network access Resource pooling Rapid elasticity Measured service How does Solaris 11 support these capabilities? Well, one of the key enabling technologies for cloud computing is virtualization, and Solaris 11 along with Oracle's SPARC and x86 hardware offerings provides the full range of virtualization technologies including dynamic hardware domains, hypervisors for both x86 and SPARC systems, and efficient non-hypervisor workload virtualization with containers. This provides the elasticity needed for cloud systems by supporting on-demand creation and resizing of application environments; it supports the safe partitioning of cloud systems into multi-tenant infrastructures, adding resources as needed and deprovisioning computing resources when no longer needed, allowing for pay-only-for-usage chargeback models. For cloud computing developers, add to that the next generation of Java, and you've got the NIST requirements covered. The results, or one of them anyway, are services like the new Oracle Public Cloud. And Solaris is the ideal platform for running your Java applications. So, if you want to develop for cloud computing, for IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS, start with an operating system designed to support cloud's key requirements…start with Solaris 11.

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  • New Book: Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Handbook

    - by user12608550
    Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Handbook, by Tom Plunkett, TJ Palazzolo, and Tejas Joshi, Oracle Press. The well-known characteristics and tiers of cloud computing have spawned myriad implementations by a host of vendors and system integrators. One of these, Oracle's Exalogic Elastic Cloud, part of Oracle's family of Engineered Systems, is a key component of Oracle's public and private cloud computing solutions, providing critical PaaS (Platform as a Service) features for cloud developers. These developers need guidance to take advantage of Exalogic's extensive capabilities, and the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Handbook, written by three highly experienced Oracle technologists, provides that guidance. Part One of the book covers Exalogic's hardware and software components, and includes a very useful chapter on deployment examples, describing best practices for scalabiity, availability, backup and recovery, and multi-tenant security, including integration with other Oracle Engineered Systems and products such as Exadata and storage subsystems. Part Two is a thorough guide to Exalogic installation features, configuration and monitoring, packaged application software management, and scalable application development. The book also provides an extensive list of online resources, including pointers to Web sites, whitepapers, instructional videos, and other Oracle documentation. So, if you're planning to implement Exalogic as part of your cloud infrastructure, or are considering such, you'll find lots of sage advice and best practices in this handbook.

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  • The Growing Importance of Network Virtualization

    - by user12608550
    The Growing Importance of Network Virtualization We often focus on server virtualization when we discuss cloud computing, but just as often we neglect to consider some of the critical implications of that technology. The ability to create virtual environments (or VEs [1]) means that we can create, destroy, activate and deactivate, and more importantly, MOVE them around within the cloud infrastructure. This elasticity and mobility has profound implications for how network services are defined, managed, and used to provide cloud services. It's not just servers that benefit from virtualization, it's the network as well. Network virtualization is becoming a hot topic, and not just for discussion but for companies like Oracle and others who have recently acquired net virtualization companies [2,3]. But even before this topic became so prominent, Solaris engineers were working on technologies in Solaris 11 to virtualize network services, known as Project Crossbow [4]. And why is network virtualization so important? Because old assumptions about network devices, topology, and management must be re-examined in light of the self-service, elasticity, and resource sharing requirements of cloud computing infrastructures. Static, hierarchical network designs, and inter-system traffic flows, need to be reconsidered and quite likely re-architected to take advantage of new features like virtual NICs and switches, bandwidth control, load balancing, and traffic isolation. For example, traditional multi-tier Web services (Web server, App server, DB server) that share net traffic over Ethernet wires can now be virtualized and hosted on shared-resource systems that communicate within a larger server at system bus speeds, increasing performance and reducing wired network traffic. And virtualized traffic flows can be monitored and adjusted as needed to optimize network performance for dynamically changing cloud workloads. Additionally, as VEs come and go and move around in the cloud, static network configuration methods cannot easily accommodate the routing and addressing flexibility that VE mobility implies; virtualizing the network itself is a requirement. Oracle Solaris 11 [5] includes key network virtualization technologies needed to implement cloud computing infrastructures. It includes features for the creation and management of virtual NICs and switches, and for the allocation and control of the traffic flows among VEs [6]. Additionally it allows for both sharing and dedication of hardware components to network tasks, such as allocating specific CPUs and vNICs to VEs, and even protocol-specific management of traffic. So, have a look at your current network topology and management practices in view of evolving cloud computing technologies. And don't simply duplicate the physical architecture of servers and connections in a virtualized environment…rethink the traffic flows among VEs and how they can be optimized using Oracle Solaris 11 and other Oracle products and services. [1] I use the term "virtual environment" or VE here instead of the more commonly used "virtual machine" or VM, because not all virtualized operating system environments are full OS kernels under the control of a hypervisor…in other words, not all VEs are VMs. In particular, VEs include Oracle Solaris zones, as well as SPARC VMs (previously called LDoms), and x86-based Solaris and Linux VMs running under hypervisors such as OEL, Xen, KVM, or VMware. [2] Oracle follows VMware into network virtualization space with Xsigo purchase; http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_21191001/oracle-follows-vmware-into-network-virtualization-space-xsigo [3] Oracle Buys Xsigo; http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1721421 [4] Oracle Solaris 11 Networking Virtualization Technology, http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/technologies/networkvirtualization-312278.html [5] Oracle Solaris 11; http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/solaris/solaris11/overview/index.html [6] For example, the Solaris 11 'dladm' command can be used to limit the bandwidth of a virtual NIC, as follows: dladm create-vnic -l net0 -p maxbw=100M vnic0

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  • Ginormous...the new Oracle T5-8 SPARC SuperCluster!

    - by user12608550
    Ginormous...no other way to describe it...the new Oracle T5-8 SPARC SuperCluster...2000+ fast CPU threads, massive memory (DRAM & Flash), 1.2 M IOPS, HUGE storage and bandwidth...WOW! Wanna build a SPARC Cloud? This is it! Multiple virtualization technologies (VM Server for SPARC, and Solaris zones) for elasticity and resource pooling along with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c providing full cloud management capability. Check it out!: ORACLE SUPERCLUSTER T5-8 Overview and Frequently Asked Questions Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 Oracle T5-8 SuperCluster E-Book

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  • Clouds Aroud the World

    - by user12608550
    At the NIST Cloud Computing Workshop this week; representatives from Canada, China, and Japan presented on their cloud computing efforts. Some interesting points made: Canada: Building "Service Canada" cloud for all citizen services, but raised the issue of data location...cloud data must be within Canada border, so they will not focus on public clouds where they don't know or can't control data location. Japan: In response to the massive destruction of the Great East Japan Earthquake, Japan is building nation-wide cloud services to support disaster relief, data recovery, and support for rebuilding new communities. US Ambassador Philip Verveer discussed the need for international cooperation and standards development to enable interoperability of cloud services, keeping in mind cultural and political differences. Additionally, an industry panel reported on cloud standards development, including some actual interoperability testing at http://www.cloudplugfest.org. Much of the first two days of the workshop covered progress and action plans around the 10 High-Priority Requirements to Further USG Agency Cloud Computing Adoption. Thursday's sessions will cover the work of the various NIST Cloud Computing Working Groups on Reference Architecture and Taxonomy Standards Acceleration to Jumpstart the Adoption of Cloud Computing (SAJACC) Cloud Security Standards Roadmap Business Use Cases (see Working Groups of NIST Cloud Computing )

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  • READ_ME_FIRST: What Do I Do All of Those SPARC Threads?

    - by user12608550
    New Oracle Technical White Paper: READ_ME_FIRST: What Do I Do All of Those SPARC Threads? Executive Overview With an amazing 1,536 threads in an Oracle M5-32 system, the number of threads in a single system has never been so high. This offers a tremendous processing capacity, but one may wonder how to make optimal use of all these resources. In this technical white paper, we explain how the heavily threaded Oracle T5 and M5 servers can be deployed to efficiently consolidate and manage workloads using virtualization through Oracle Solaris Zones, Oracle VM Server for SPARC, and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center, as well as how to improve the performance of a single application through multi-threading. READ_ME_FIRST: What Do I Do All of Those SPARC Threads?

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