Sysadmin

So everybody knows by now that Oracle just jumped into the virtualization fray with their new Oracle VM product. If you’ve been under a rock, go to the oracle website to check it out. Given that I’m cheap and currently using VMWare’s free offering, I jumped at the chance to check out a supposedly ’enterprise ready’ Xen implementation for free. The 1/3 the overhead claim is just gravy! Anyway, as cool as Oracle Enterprise (Unbreakable?!) Linux may be, I’m running CentOS and am perfectly happy with it. Oracle VM wants a dedicated machine for the management station, which I can arrange for with a little tweaking. However, I build most of my machines up from ‘minimal’ installs. I read in the Oracle documentation that I would need libaio installed to make things go, which I did without any trouble. ...

Prescript: I wrote this over a month ago and still haven’t found an authoring plugin I like so it still looks terrible. See my next post and give me ideas or just call me lazy, thanks! Based on http://blog.scottlowe.org/2007/01/15/linux-ad-integration-version-4/ First, install windows 2003 R2 and install the identity management for unix option. Open control panel, select add remove programs, click add/remove windows components. It will grind a while and give you a list of possible services. You’ll need to expand ‘Active Directory Services’ and check the ‘Identify Management for Unix’ service. You will need to be in the schema admins group to do this. ...

Sun has really been pushing innovation with Solaris recently, and since it’s now freely available and open sourced, what better time to give it a test drive? With the Solaris Express Nevada 49 release (get it from http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/on/ and click the CD Version or DVD Version links under step 3b) Sun has officially included their BrandZ extension to Solaris containers. BrandZ allows containers to be ‘Branded’, the upshot of it is that you can run an entire system under a lxrun-like technology. ...

In the process of trying to figure out my VM performance problems, I’ve been doing a lot of filesystem benchmarking. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of consistency between platforms or machine classes as to benchmarking methodology, so I’ve had some trouble generating comparable numbers. However, I’ve gotten the solaris filebench suite running on linux, and bonnie++ running on solaris, so I can now generate comparable numbers across both platforms. One of my primary interests is the throughput I can get out of the 3ware 7506 raid controller in my unix nas box, both in order to optimize it and in order to compare to other solutions and determine if they will actually be an upgrade or not. In the process, I’ve been benchmarking an older Dell Precision Workstation 420. It has 4 wd1200jb drives plugged into its onboard IDE boards (yes, they are sharing ide channels), and is currently running opensolaris nv47. I played around with a few different ZFS configurations, but eventually settled on raidz, leaving me with 360G usable disk space. Here’s some of the numbers I got: ...