Register for the website! http://www.austinsug.org/Members.html

If you want to be part of the leadership board, contact Jeff. Jeff.blanchard at sun.com.

Thanks to Sigma Solutions for providing the food and drink.

Next meeting: August 15, 2007. Solaris 10 Dtrace by Jarod Jenson, chief architect at Aeysis. Jarod is the resource Sun brings into companies who need dtrace help. Very likely a hands on meeting.

This meeting is about the different Virtualization technologies in Solaris and developed on Sun Sparc hardware. The presentation was given by Scott Gaspard at sun.com.

Years ago, in the land of dinosaurs, everyone stuck everything on a few large systems. Later, people used cheap hardware based on x86 systems and replaced the big iron. The problem is, people couldn’t scale the apps beyond the confines of the box, so it ended up with server sprawl where you had dozens of vendors, no real remote management, operating systems all over the place and lots of hardware that was provisioned to run for a certain type of load that may have not fully utilized the resources on that system. Somewhere along the way, someone decided that you could stick multiple operating systems and applications on a single piece of physical hardware and you ended up increasing the utilization of the underlying hardware. This translated to lower cost because you needed fewer resources to run the system (cooling, power, people).

I've been receiving double notifications for things posted to the website. Trying to see where it's occuring.

Last night Sun held it's first Austin Solaris User Group meeting at Painter
Hall on the UT campus. The event was reasonably well attended with ~15-20
people from various companies and academia around Austin.

The meeting was broken up into two parts: a presentation about new features
in Solaris 10 release 11/06 and a discussion about how, when, and what the
user group will be.

The presentation was a whirlwind tour of things like zones and their
improvements (such as cloning zones, effectively creating a flashstart-like
system for zone building), ZFS (such as RAIDZ2 which is a RAID-6-like RAID

Recently, Sun announced an initiative called Project Blackbox. If you haven't heard of it, it's something they call a "virtual data center". But, it's real and physical. You can touch it, hear it, move it, and ... as the Sun guy said, taste it if you like. (Personally, I wouldn't, I don't know where that datacenter has been).

Blackbox is a shippable mini data center. They take a 20 foot steel shipping container, stuff eight racks into it with hookups for 3-phase power, networking, and water pipes. You can use up to seven of those racks for computing equipment for a total of 250 standard rack U of space (just think, that's up to 1000 Opteron cores in that footprint). The eighth rack is retained for networking and miscellaneous environmental equipment (monitoring and dehumidification it seems).

Some photos I took of LOPSA at LISA2006.

Whee.

I'm finally done with my trip report for work. It probably still needs polishing. I'm done though. I can't bring myself to write anything else about it.

It's viewable at Travis Campbell's LISA 2006 Trip Report.

All my notes are also published on Google Docs. If anyone's interested, I'll post direct links to them, or just provide pdfs somewhere. Google doesn't make it easy to gather all the urls of published docs right now. :-/

Or how I conquered out-of-band management with a box of serial and a power button.

In the beginning

When dinosaurs ruled the earth and small, mammalian critters scurried through the data center, the classic method of doing out-of-band management was via a crash cart and the laying of holy hands upon the ailing system. You'd wheel that old, cranky monitor around while the wheels going thumpa-thumpa-thumpa across the raised floor. You'd crawl back behind your computer shelves with a 25 foot vga and ps/2 cable, plug in, tune out, and administer. Maybe you were lucky and had in-rack KVM access. Whatever it was, it still required a physical presence in the room, often at 2AM when you were 30 miles away at a rocking party.