It is second week I am running OpenSolaris build 127. Why important? It contains support of Solaris 10 branded zones. We did a lot of testing (especially RDBMS) running in Branded Zones. So now you may run your old applications and use modern features of OpenSolaris. Continue reading Solaris10-Branded Zone Developer Guide. Start using OpenSolaris now.

Sometimes my TiVo gets confused after a power outage, and it takes forever to reboot (I think it's trying to recover its files which takes a while when you have over 1TB of storage connected to the TiVo).  Sometimes, I lose some of my shows, and that makes me sad.

So I decided to find some software I could get running on OpenSolaris so I could use my home media server as a backup device for my TiVo shows.

I did it, using the Galleon open source Java application; here's how.

Now, if somebody smarter than me would just port the TiVo software to OpenSolaris, we'd have the benefits of ZFS on a TiVo box.  That would be fantastic.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) is an XML-based standard, developed by the OASIS consortium, for exchanging user, resource and service provisioning information. SPML came in response to the need of unifying and automating the management of user accounts and rights inside a corporation. Indeed, with the multiplication of IT systems --logistics, accounting, customer management, human resources, you name it-- inside the companies we work for, the old (manual) ways of dealing with users --Dear Admin, please create account for new employee... Dear Admin, please give me access right for the folder/document... who doesn't remember writing one of these emails?-- could not keep up, responsible for too much incorrect data, leading to information leaks and productivity loss.

Today in its version 2.0 --version 1.0 had limited number of operations, limited scheme for user information and simpler using/integrating--, SPML has enabled the software industry to develop interoperable solutions of identity management, for the various IT systems themself to communicate and propagate changes in user information and rights. Examples of commercial solutions that are SPML-compliant include Sun Identity Manager and Oracle Identity Manager. We believe that it is essential that Enterprise Resource Management (ERM) applications today support advanced identity management operations beyond single sign-on --on that topic, check out this OpenSSO integration work.

Based in Moscow, 1C is a leading Russian software vendor, with 1M+ customers for their ERM software suite 1C:Enterprise and 18.7% market share in the Russia ERM market --making it the top #2 vendor in 2008 per a recent IDC study. 1C is particularly known as the maker of the most popular enterprise accounting system 1C:Accounting sold in the CIS region; about every company in Russia runs a copy of that software, I have been told. With such a large installed base, 1C has evolved to become the center of a large ecosystem and network of 5000+ partner integrators, resellers and software vendors. Some of which being Sun Microsystems partners as well.

To help our partners differentiate and add value in the legacy 1C ecosystem with Sun open technologies, the local ISV Engineering team engaged last year in the prototype development of an SPML interface for 1C:Enterprise, so it can integrate into the identity management frameworks deployed at large corporations. Because the 1C platform is fully based on Microsoft technologies and there was no external interfaces except Microsoft COM, our solution was to write a proxy gateway for translating SPML requests into COM API requests, and exchanging provisioning information. The gateway is embedding a web server for handling HTTP requests so an administrator can simply install the SPML gateway along with the 1C client on a clean Windows machine. That done, the provisioning information inside the 1C database can be managed from any machine on the network.

We have had very good feedback from our partners about this solution so far. It has proven to save a lot of time --and money too!-- at deployment time and in managing 1C:Enterprise, because the service could litterally be managed as an appliance and the solution did not require to install a 1C client on the machine where the Identity Management server sits. We encourage all of the 1C:Franchising network to leverage our work and put it to good use at their 1C customers. The code for the 1C SPML Gateway has been shared under an open-source license for that matter and is available for free download.

As a general solution --I'm talking outside of the 1C ecosystem now, I'm thinking of any ISV out there needing to have its application exchange user information with identity management systems--, there is a lot one can learn from this particular project. The gateway approach enables to plug legacy applications into a customer's identity infrastructure with no modification to the application --provided you have some kind of interfaces, of course. In addition, the SPML open protocol ensures maximum interoperability with modern identity management frameworks.

To conclude, anyone really is welcome to leverage our work as is, extend it --please join the community and share back-- or use it as a stub for another application --why not using Project Kenai to host and share your project as well? Most of the documentation for the 1C SPML Gateway is currently in Russian but we will be soon posting an English summary of it to make life easier. In any case, you can right away post questions in English in the issue tracker and/or mailing list.

Downloading OpenSolaris Nagios Packages

The Nagios packages are in the OpenSolaris contrib repository.

You can install these packages either using the pkg command or via
the package manager, you can go to the /contrib
repository's catalog
page and click on the 'install' link for the package(s) that you
want to install.

To set up /contrib as a valid publisher for use with the package
manager or the pkg command, do the following as a user with the root
role (or Software Installation profile):

pfexec pkg set-publisher -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib
contrib

Or you can add /contrib via the package manager through the File
-> Manage Repositories pull down. If installing from the "install"
link at http://pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib/en/catalog.shtml 
the package manager will automatically add /contrib to the list of
publishers.

To install packages using pkg, do the following:

pfexec pkg refresh

pfexec pkg install <package name>

Each monitored OpenSolaris system must have the nrpe and
nagios-plugins packages installed.

The monitoring host must have the nagios package installed.

Other Nagios Installation Details

Make sure that each monitored host has the SUNWcryr and SUNWcryx
packages installed to allow for full encryption. Without those packages nrpe cannot negotiate a working key length properly (it defaults to 256 bit keys which it cannot generate without the extra packages). http://www.sun.com/download/index.jsp?cat=Security&tab=3&subcat=Cryptography%20%26%20Encryption

Editing the nrpe Configuration File

Each monitored host must have the /usr/nagios/etc/nrpe.cfg
file customized based on the local configuration.

There are 3 sets of parameters to be considered:

1. # ALLOWED HOST ADDRESSES

# allowed_hosts is an optional comma-delimited list of IP
address or hostnames that are allowed to communicate with the nrpe
daemon. The default value for this parameter is:

allowed_hosts=127.0.0.1

This default value allows the nrpe daemon to respond only to the
local host. Other systems attempting to communicate with nrpe will be
ignored.

2. Two other variables identify the effective user and
effective group that nrpe will run as.

nrpe_user=nagios

nrpe_group=nagios

These values must correspond to a user and group defined on the
local machine. The nrpe package install does NOT automatically create
user and group nagios, so the system administrator must either create
them or must set these parameters to a user and a group which do
exist. Use these commands to create group and user nagios:

groupadd nagios

useradd -d /export/home/nagios -g nagios -m nagios

3. COMMAND DEFINITIONS

Command definitions define the commands that the nrpe daemon will
run on this host. Definitions are in the following format:

command[<command_name>]=<command_line>

When the daemon receives a request to return the results of
<command_name> it will execute the command specified by the
<command_line> argument.

The command line cannot contain macros - it must be typed exactly
as it should be executed.

Note: Any plugins used in the command lines must reside on the
machine that this daemon is running on. The examples below assume
that you have plugins installed in the /usr/nagios/libexec directory.

command[check_users]=/usr/nagios/libexec/check_users -w 5 -c 10
command[check_load]=/usr/nagios/libexec/check_load -w 15,10,5 -c
30,25,20
command[check_hda1]=/usr/nagios/libexec/check_disk -w 20% -c 10%
-p /dev/hda1
command[check_zombie_procs]=/usr/nagios/libexec/check_procs -w 5
-c 10 -s Z
command[check_total_procs]=/usr/nagios/libexec/check_procs -w 150
-c 200
command[check_total_procs]=/usr/nagios/libexec/check_solaris_procs
150 200
command[check_swap]=/usr/nagios/libexec/check_solaris_swap 100000
50000

Issue the following command on each monitored host to start nrpe
running as a daemon:

/usr/nagios/bin/nrpe -c /usr/nagios/etc/nrpe.cfg -d

To start up nrpe in a non-global Solaris 10 zone, either
configure and build
with

LDFLAGS="-R/usr/sfw/lib",
or add /usr/sfw/lib to the runtime linker search path. See crle(1).

Editing the Nagios Configuration Files

The host on which Nagios (the monitor) is installed must have the
following files customized based on the local configuration:

/usr/nagios/etc/objects/commands.cfg

/usr/nagios/etc/objects/localhost.cfg

Two Solaris specific scripts have been written and are distributed
as part of the OpenSolaris nagios plugins package. These scripts
enable monitoring of the number of processes and amount of swap space
on the (Open)Solaris system. The scripts are named
check_solaris_procs and check_solaris_swap. Due to differences in
command implementation, the Linux scripts to check processes and swap
space do not run on Solaris.

To monitor the number of processes on a Solaris system, replace
these lines in the commands.cfg file:

command_name check_local_procs
command_line $USER1$/check_procs -w $ARG1$ -c $ARG2$ -s
$ARG3$

with:

command_name check_local_procs
command_line $USER1$/check_solaris_procs 250 400

Similarly, the lines to define the command to check swap space are
changed to:

command_name check_local_swap
command_line $USER1$/check_solaris_swap

Verify that your changes to these files are syntactically correct
by running this command:

/usr/nagios/bin/nagios -v /usr/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg

( Output should end with " Things look okay ..." )

Starting the Nagios Monitor

Once the commands.cfg and localhost.cfg file are modified to
specify the hosts and commands to be monitored, you start the Nagios
monitor with:

/usr/nagios/bin/nagios /usr/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg -d &

For more information, check:

http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/quickstart.html

Observing the Results

Open source Nagios addons have been written to graphically display
the results of the monitoring and to store the information in
various databases, including MySQL and RRD.

The basic output of the Nagios monitor can be viewed by regularly
checking the output of the status.dat file using this command:

grep plugin_output /usr/nagios/var/status.dat | grep -v long

All lines should contain "OK". The lines you see may
look like this:

plugin_output=PING OK - Packet loss = 0%, RTA = 0.09 ms
plugin_output=OK - load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
plugin_output=USERS OK - 4 users currently logged in
plugin_output=PING OK - Packet loss = 0%, RTA = 0.09 ms
plugin_output=DISK OK - free space: / 47829 MB (91%
inode=99%):
plugin_output=OK - 134 processes

These output lines correspond to status checks on ping, load,
number of users, ping (remote monitored host), free disk space, and
number of processes.

A CGI based web interface may also be installed to provide a
graphic display of the parameter statuses for each monitored host.

This provides you with a basic view of Nagios capabilities. A
number of books have been written on the subject of configuring and
expanding Nagios, and a large and vibrant Nagios user community
exists.

Consult nagios.org as a starting point for expanding your
understanding of this popular network monitoring tool.

Went to London for the LOSUG meetup last night. Had a really fantastic time and met lots of great people. Thanks to James and Joy for organising my session and for inviting me along to talk. Met up with Ralph Turner from OpenAnswers who I've not seen for an age, Ralph used to do work for us when I was in Developer Tech Support and we see each other now and again, but not often enough. My former boss Dani Flexer was there and he seems to be doing really well for himself, he was a speaker at a previous LOSUG meeting in September. I have to read his white paper when I get the chance. I also met Robert Milkowski who is a regular contributor to SourceJuicer (he recently contributed Alpine). We had never met before so it was great to put a face to the name. I don't remember the names of everyone that I met last night but it was really, really good to get the chance to meet you all.

Owen Roberts' gave a great talk on creating an OpenSolaris build server from IPS images, it gave me a sense of DejaVu as so much of it was the same as what I'm doing with updating Lighttpd and Ruby for WebStack in OpenSolaris.

The slides for my talk are here, but they are fairly minimalist (which works so much better for me as a presenter). I'll also record the demo that I gave and post that on slx.sun.com.  I enjoyed giving the presentation immensely and I hope that everyone got as much from it as I did. I really, really look forward to going back in the the new year and going into the technical details of publishing a package into /contrib.

Also, a shout out to the SourceJuicer team in Dublin and to Jim Walker in California. They had a network outage during my afternoon yesterday that meant that the SourceJuicer site was unavailable and the systems couldn't be accessed at all. Everyone worked together to get it back up and running so that I could run my demo, keeping me informed by phone and by email. Thanks for that guys :o)

We are pleased to share with you another initiative that could be of interest to Startups such as yours. Our engineering team alongwith our partners will conduct a fortnightly technology session on a topic of interest to startups. The inaugural  session is scheduled for 25th November at Divyasree Chambers in our Sun offices in Bangalore and the details are as below:

Technology Session on My SQL - High Availability Solutions

Where : Sun Microsystems Office , Divyasree Chambers , Bangalore
When : 3pm to 6pm on Wednesday , 25th November, 2009

Agenda

Welcome

3.15 PM - 4.15 PM  : Different High Availability Solutions in My SQL

4.30 PM - 5.30 PM : Scaling with My SQL

               + Challenges faced by end users to keep servers
                 performing at their best while being configured to be
                 highly available.
               + Sun technologies addressing the challenges
               + Brief overview of both MySQL & Sun availability options
               + How to  achieve end to end high availability without
                 compromising on performance and scalability.

5.30 -5.45 PM : Closing Remarks

There are only 30 seats available , if interested please send us email on isvsupport-AT-sun-DOT-com  with the following details:
Email Subject: Technology Session on My SQL - High Availability Solutions
Name of the participant :
Functional Area
E mail
Phone

Look forward to hearing back from you. Also would appreciate inputs on the technology topics that would interest you, so that we can plan subsequent technology sessions.

Désolé, il ne reste plus de place pour cette matinée dédiée à l'optimisation des performances MySQL.

Date : 24 novembre 2009
Prix : Cette matinée est gratuite !

Session 1 : 9h30-10h45

• Architecture MySQL : Parsing, exécution, optimizer, query cache, binlog…etc
• Architecture Innodb : Clustered index, bufferpool, hash index, insert buffer, locking model, MVCC, recovery log, checkpoint…etc. Comparaison avec les autres moteurs de stockage (PBXT, MySQL Cluster) et bases de données (PostgreSQL, Oracle ..).

Pause/Café : 10h45-11h00.

Session 2 : 11h00-12h30

• Évolutions récentes : Google SMP patches,  XtraDB, Oracle innodb plugin 1.0.4
• Apports de MySQL 5.4
• Améliorations à venir :  Ahead flushing / Adaptive checkpoint,  Purge lag / Purge thread, Splitted locks, etc…Explication technique des améliorations et des gains de performance obtenus.

Nous parlerons aussi de MySQL Enterprise et du MySQL Query analyzer qui vous permet d’optimiser un environnement MySQL.

Cette matinée se veut conviviale et interactive avec Q&A.

Désolé, il ne reste plus de place pour cette matinée dédiée à l'optimisation des performances MySQL.

Date : 24 novembre 2009

Session 1 : 9h30-10h45

• Architecture MySQL : Parsing, exécution, optimizer, query cache, binlog…etc
• Architecture Innodb : Clustered index, bufferpool, hash index, insert buffer, locking model, MVCC, recovery log, checkpoint…etc. Comparaison avec les autres moteurs de stockage (PBXT, MySQL Cluster) et bases de données (PostgreSQL, Oracle ..).

Pause/Café : 10h45-11h00.

Session 2 : 11h00-12h30

• Évolutions récentes : Google SMP patches,  XtraDB, Oracle innodb plugin 1.0.4
• Apports de MySQL 5.4
• Améliorations à venir :  Ahead flushing / Adaptive checkpoint,  Purge lag / Purge thread, Splitted locks, etc…Explication technique des améliorations et des gains de performance obtenus.

Nous parlerons aussi de MySQL Enterprise et du MySQL Query analyzer qui vous permet d’optimiser un environnement MySQL.

Cette matinée se veut conviviale et interactive avec Q&A.

Python is a basis  for many software developers.  Using the latest version it should configure correctly on Solaris10 X86. If you use older versions you  may run into problems, and may use these workarounds.

I am using the SunStudio12 or later compiler release, normally installed under
/opt/SUNWspro/bin

1. Edit the configure file

add the following after  line 3931
# disable check for SUN Studio cc since it seems to pass, but generates a warning
if test "$CC" = cc
then
ac_cv_opt_olimit_ok=no
fi

Next change is in line 10971
              else LDSHARED='$(CC) -G';
where you have to add the $(BASECFLAGS)
             else LDSHARED='$(CC) $(BASECFLAGS) -G';

and finally in line 11073
where you have to change the -xcode option to the -Kpic
              else CCSHARED="-xcode=pic32";
becomes
             else CCSHARED="-Kpic";

Finally

./configure
--prefix=your_prefix_path/Python-2.5 --enable-shared --without-gcc
CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc LDFLAGS='-fast -m64 -xarch=sse2a'
BASECFLAGS='-fast -m64 -xarch=sse2a'

make all

make install

Tip :

Sometimes you need to build your applications with the C++ libraries using the STL port (instead of standard libC).
There is no C++ in Python, but you can compile the main program with C++:

./configure
--prefix=/export/home/gunter/install64_stl/Python-2.5 --enable-shared
--without-gcc CC=/export/home/SUNWspro/bin/cc LDFLAGS='-fast -m64
-xarch=sse2a' BASECFLAGS='-fast -m64 -xarch=sse2a' --with-cxx-main='CC
-library=stlport4

Congrats Joyent team for the fantastic announcement today!! 

Intel has just announced a strategic investment in Joyent. More on the Press Release.

Joyent, both a long-time Sun Startup Essentials member and hosting partner - has been profitable for years, and boasts some really impressive customers (e.g. ABC.com, LinkedIn, and more). More recently Gilt Groupe, an online luxury goods retailer with over $200M, publicly stated that they spend less than 1% of their revenue on IT infrastructure (all on Joyent), which is 70% savings over Gartner industry averages. That saves them at least $10M a year!

Check out this great video!

 

Le prochain OpenCoffee de Rennes se tiendra demain, mercredi 18 novembre à 19h00, au St Melaine rue St Melaine.

Réunion de l'OpenCoffee de Sophia le jeudi 19 novembre de 18 à 21h00, aux Terrasses d'Antipolis, 300 route des Crêtes.

All the details can be found in this article.

This past week I have been working with 2 Web2.0 startups - members of Sun Startup Essentials, they get the support for free - that are looking at improving the response time of their web site.

We've been working at understanding how they servers behave today and what could prevent their application to scale, which led me to show how to run a quick diagnostic on an existing system and to restate some key fundamentals in terms of scalability.

Let's start by the fundamentals.

Any piece of software is nothing else than a set of instructions that need 2 things: computing units to execute on, and a fast access to data.

Computing units are available in the form of a hardware threads located on a processor. The number of threads that a server makes available to the application depends on the number of processors on the server, the number of core per processor, and of threads per core. The only thing we have to keep in mind is that the industry has moved heavily to processors that provide many hardware threads (up to 64 on a CMT chip), so taking advantage of multiple threads is definitely the right way to scale as far as computing power is concerned.

As per the fast access to data, the rule of thumb I always used is that good performance can only be achieved if the data is located in physical memory - in RAM. As soon as disks are involved the penalty is in an order of magnitude - if not more.

How do I take advantage of multiple threads with MySQL or memcached? The good news is that both support multithreading which means they both have the ability to create many software threads that are mapped to HW-threads to execute many instruction sets in parallel (with memcached you may have to recompile the code according to this page).

Now how do I check what's really happening on my system?

First, let's check how many HW threads are available on my server. On Solaris or OpenSolaris I run psrinfo:

root@pelvoux:~# psrinfo
0    on-line   since 11/15/2009 17:09:45
1    on-line   since 11/15/2009 17:09:49

The command reports me that I have 2 HW threads on line (I have a dual-core X86 processor on my laptop).

Then I can check how many software threads each application is actually using. To do so I run the prstat command. On the following example prstat 5 tells me that MySQL is using 10 software threads. The number is displayed on the right-hand side column NLWP. Note that with 10 software threads MySQL can not take advantage of a server that has 64 HW-threads, but for my 2 core laptop this is already more than needed.

Next, are the software threads leveraging the HW-threads? Are they keeping the CPU busy? The fastest way to check if the CPU is loaded is to run vmstat 5:

In this example my CPU spends 98 to 99% of its time idle, and 0 or 1% executing code from an application - column us, or from the system - column sy. If MySQL was running on all CPU cylinders, I would see most of the load reported in column us, and possibly a few percent points in column sy. In my case MySQL does not receive any request.

But there might be other cases where I see both slow or hanging requests and a CPU partially loaded with applications. If my CPU is not fully loaded, and if I have enough software threads, why do I see slow requests? Well, in that case it's likely that requests are competing for resources - such as tables - that can not be shared. This is a situation that impedes scalability. Only a few requests are executed at a time keeping only a few threads busy. Though outside of the scope of this article note that if you are using MyISAM, moving to InnoDB can help you to address table-lock issues, hence improve the scalability of your application.

So with psrinfo, prstat, and vmstat I can have a quick overview of how my server is doing in terms of CPU power an load.

Now, how can I check if I am running out of physical memory?

The diagnostic above assumes that the limiting factor is the computing power and not the access to data, not the amount of physical memory. But how can I be sure I have enough RAM and what happens in the face of a shortage?

When running out of RAM, a system starts to page. It tries to free some space in RAM by transferring some content from RAM - available as pages - to disk. The OS kernel scans the RAM to locate the last recently used pages and put them on disk, with the hope that they won't be used anytime soon (in which case they would have to be brought back into RAM).

A peak in paging activity is nothing wrong. Cleaning up the RAM a little bit does not mean I am facing a shortage. It's when my system keeps on paging that I know I do not have enough RAM. Once again vmstat 5 helps me monitor the rate at which the kernel scans the RAM looking for pages to be moved away: the sr column reports the scaning rate. If it never goes back to zero it's time to add some more RAM to my server.

LinuxWorld is a congress annually held in the “Jaarbeurs” in Utrecht. It focusses on Linux, OpenSource and Free Software (hi Adriaan!). The visitors are informed about the latest developments in OpenSource, learn what OpenSource solutions could reduce cost in their organizations etc. Besides the technical information shared; these type of conferences are also great to network and meet colleagues in IT.

Co-located with LinuxWorld are the conferences infosecurity.nl, Storage Expo and the Tooling event addressing IT administration and Storage. So, all four big IT events are at one location at the same time! All four events in total draw thousands of people to Utrecht. In 2008 more than 8,000 people visited the four conferences in two days.

Sun got very good feedback on their VDI demo setup running 6 Sun rays and a Demo server with Open Source software stacks. Visitors were really impressed with the freedom of choice for OpenSource workplaces which is offered with VDI. This choice of freedom is really well in line with initiatives like Nederland Open In Verbinding: an initiative of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs.

At StorageExpo the Sun stand was visited quite well. There theme was "Save Time”: fast storage, low prices. The breakout sessions on OpenStorage were packed. Both sessions had more than 60 people attending.

The Dutch OpenSolaris User Group (NLOSUG) was present as well. I gave a short presentation about OpenSolaris. What is it?, what are some of the key features?, the licensing model and how to contribute to OpenSolaris were some of the topics discussed. This talk was attended by about 30 people. Because one cannot tell everything about OpenSolaris in just 20 minutes there was a lot of talk about OpenSolaris afterwards. There was much interest in contributing to OpenSolaris using SourceJuicer, how to make an IPS package, ZFS features etc.

It is really good to see that there is so much interest in the products of Sun Microsystems and it's OpenSource solutions. The interest and popularity is growing bigger and bigger.

GreenBeat 2009 will bring together the nation’s 500 leading entrepreneurs, investors, utilities, technology executives, and policymakers to accelerate the development of a leaner, more efficient electrical grid. GreenBeat 2009 will map out the hottest business and technology opportunities the Smart Grid has to offer. Renovating the power grid requires big ideas from start-ups!

The program will feature participation by Al Gore, former Vice President and Nobel Prize Winner; John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins; Eric Schmitt of Google and Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures.  The program also features executives from Cisco, Tendril, Oracle, and more. Expect lively discussion and power networking. The program also includes an innovation competition that will highlight new technologies and will explore the financial and investment opportunities afforded by the stimulus package.  More details can be found at www.greenbeat2009.com.

Will Smart Grid and smart metering initiatives change consumer behavior, and how? How will the more than $4 billion the Obama Administration has earmarked for Smart Grid make a difference? Which incentives and policies will speed deployment? Where will the most disruption take place in this trillion-dollar business that hasn’t changed for decades? Do startups stand a chance? Where should they focus? What role will cybersecurity and interoperability play in how a new, revamped grid takes shape? GreenBeat will get industry leaders’ answers to these questions and more.

We have made arrangements for 30% off the regular rate and you may use the following link and special code to register. http://greenbeat2009.eventbrite.com/?discount=GBSunVIP

What an evening of discussion and education on Brand, Michael Bayler gave an amazingly energetic hours talk on brand and how important it is to be clear about your brand strategy before you do anything else.  The video of this event will be available in a few weeks time and thus all Sun Startup Essential members who couldn't make the event can watch the material and gain an insight into this wonderful evening.

Michael Bayler has a website here if you wish to know more about him and what he can do for you.

Have you ever had a great idea for a startup but needed the motivation and encouragement to actually make it a reality? Join the Startup Weekend community and find out how easy it is to go from idea to launch in only 54 hours! 

We are also excited to announce Sun Startup Essentials will be supporting Startup Weekend in New York City for Global Entrepreneurship Week November 20-22^nd at our office in Manhattan! Sun Startup Essentials members get 25% off. Send us an email to get the discount code.

Not in NYC? There are 14 events before the end of the year! Find all of the upcoming events at http://startupweekend.org/

What is Startup Weekend?

Startup Weekend is a 54 hour startup event that provides networking, resources and incentives for individuals and teams to go from idea to launch. Get connected with local developers, innovators and entrepreneurs. Build Community. Start Companies. No Talk - All Action. 

When:

November 20-22 (Friday 6pm-11pm, Sat/Sun 8am-10pm)

Where:

Sun Microsystems, 101 Park Ave, NYC. Map.

Website: http://nyc.startupweekend.org/

Who Should Attend:

Startup Weekend is open to anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur!  Developers, Designers, Marketing, Business Development, Social Media, Lawyers, Students, etc… Anyone who considers themselves an entrepreneur.

What:

On Friday night people pitch their ideas, there can be as few as 25 pitches or as many as 100, we keep on pitching until everyone is done!  We do a simple vote of everyone’s favorite 2 or 3 to narrow down the ideas by about 80%. Individuals then gather around each idea to discuss feasibility, and normally a few more will be dropped.  For a room of one hundred people we generally see teams between 5-10 people and a total of between 10-15 teams working away on 10-15 new startups. People then come in early on Saturday and work work work for the rest of the weekend until giving a demo of the newly created startup on Sunday evening.  We’ve had teams that were generating revenue on Saturday evening in the past!  It’s a great learning experience, great networking, and a lot of fun to roll up your sleeves and get in the trenches launching a new startup!  

Cost:

Only $75 which includes amazing speakers, mentors & assistance from experienced entrepreneurs, prizes, 7 Meals, Drinks, Free Web Hosting, Handouts, Swag, and more.

About Startup Weekend:

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ABSTRACT

This blog entry provides technical insight into the benchmark of the MySQL database on Xen Virtualization environment based on the xVM Hypervisor

Introduction to the xVM Hypervisor

 xVM hypervisor can securely execute multiple virtual machines simultaneously, each running its own operating system, on a single physical system. Each virtual machine instance is called a domain. There are two kinds of domains. The control domain is called domain0, or dom0. A guest OS, or unprivileged domain, is called a domainU or domU. Unlike virtualization using zones, each domain runs a full instance of an operating system.

Introduction to the MySQL database

 MySQL database is the world's most popular open source database because of its fast performance, high reliability, ease of use, and dramatic cost savings.

Tests Objective:

The main objective is to bring an understanding on how MySQL behaves within a virtualized environment, using UFS or ZFS file system

Tests Description:

We built a test environment by using a Sun X4450 MySQL 5.4 was installed on OpenSolaris 2009_06 because of the OS built-in integration with the xVM Hypervisor . A separate set of performance tests was run with MySQL data placed on a SAN disk. xVM guest OS is OpenSolaris 2009_06 .

When running under xVM the server resources ( cpu, memory) were divided between the dom0 and domU guest OS.

 dom0 - 2 vcpu and 2GB RAM

domU -  4 vcpu and 6GB RAM

• We used paravirtualized domU operating system in order to get the best performance.


• We chose to analyze the performance behavior for InnoDB storage engine due to its high popularity.


• We chose to analyze the performance behavior for two file systems (ZFS and UFS) in order to check which file system performs better for MySQL .

SysBench was used as loading tool to test base performance for each configuration.

The tool is simple to use, modular, cross-platform and multi-threaded. It also and can give a good feeling regarding the performance for a simple database use.  

Hardware configuration:

Server :SUN X4450 ,with 2X 2.9GHz dual-core CPU,8GB RAM , 2 X 146 GB internal disks.

Storage :StorageTek 6140 - configured RAID 0+1, directly attached to the server.

Software: MySQL 5.4, OpenSolaris 2009_06 .

The SysBench script

sysbench --test=oltp --mysql-table-engine=innodb --oltp-table-size=10000000 --mysql-socket=/tmp/mysql.sock --mysql-user=root prepare sysbench --num-threads=8 --max-time=900 --max-requests=500000 --test=oltp --mysql-user=root --mysql-host=localhost --mysql-port=3306 --mysql-table-engine=innodb --oltp-test-mode=complex --oltp-table-size=80000000 run

We tested it with different number of threads  4 ,8 ,16 ,32  (--num-threads=8 )  

The benchmark layout

After the creation of OpenSolaris 2009_06 in domU we attached the SAN storage

Attached the file system to the guest

xm block-attach para-opensolaris phy:/dev/dsk/c0t600A0B8000267DD400000A8D494DB1A6d0p0 3 w

Verified access to the file system from the guest

root@para-opensolaris:~# format
Searching for disks...done

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
     0. c7d3 <DEFAULT cyl 4096 alt 0 hd 128 sec 32>
        /xpvd/xdf@3
     1. c7t0d0 <DEFAULT cyl 3915 alt 0 hd 255 sec 63>
        /xpvd/xdf@51712

zpool create -f xvmpool c7d3

root@para-opensolaris:~# zpool list
NAME      SIZE   USED  AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
rpool    29.8G  10.6G  19.2G    35%  ONLINE  -
xvmpool  117.94G  89.5K  117.94G     0%  ONLINE  -

The first result of running this benchmark on UFS

The first result of running this benchmark on ZFS

The results after match ZFS recored size to block size and limiting  ZFS ARC size

zfs create -o recordsize=16k xvmpool/mysql

set zfs:zfs_arc_max = 0x10000000   in /etc/system

The results after disable ZFS cache flush ( We have battery backed cache) 

set zfs:zfs_nocacheflush = 1   in /etc/system

Conclusion

After ZFS tuning we were able to receive the same results as UFS  

Thus, we can benefit from ZFS extra features like snapshot and clone.

For more information about ZFS and OpenSolaris

I'll be giving a talk on SourceJuicer at the London OpenSolaris User Group meeting on Wednesday 18th November. On before me is Owen Roberts from the Solaris Sustaining group, and he'll be talking about how the core of OpenSolaris will move to being built from source directly to IPS packages (yay!).

So if you are interested,  register in advance here and then come along to the Sun Customer Briefing Centre at:

45 King William Street
London, EC4R 9AN
Map

Doors open at 6PM and the talking starts at 6:30PM, there'll be food and socialising afterward.

While on the subject of SourceJuicer, George Drapeau the OSS core team lead here in ISV-Engineering at Sun has just published a video blog on installing Acquia Drupal on OpenSolaris from the /contrib repository. You can find it on George's Blog, it's very slick :o)

Looking for rock-solid web hosting at discounted rates? Talk to someone that understand startups

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Not a member yet? Sign up for Sun's startup program absolutely free at sun.com/startup.  And if for some reason you do not qualify for the Sun Startup Essentials program, don't worry. Joyent has several plans available that will suit you just fine.

And if you don't love Joyent and Sun Startup Essentials already, check out the free Facebook Developer Program. 

Sun and VMware have just released a prototype of a OpenSolaris 2009.06 based JeOS VMWare appliance for building your own lightweight virtual machines. Its only 660MB in size and offers all the advanced OpenSolaris features like ZFS, DTrace, Solaris Containers, Network virtualization with Crossbow, our new Service management framework (SMF), new Image Packaging System (IPS), Solaris containers...All the features you have come to love and enjoy about OpenSolaris. And its Free. Enjoy!

Learn more about OpenSolaris JeOs here. 

Jez Kay is Owner of NowHouse, a digital video and sound production company based in London. He helps businesses inject personality into their brands through vision, soundtracks and the occasional song and dance.

This is the event Jeremy attended and is discussing below

Greg Dyke's talk early on the 22nd October at Sun Start-Essentials HQ, as a guest
speaker of Federation 100 was engaging, illuminating, mischevious and
all-in-all pretty inspiring.

Unlike some other peers or similar luminaries he doesn't cloud things with
jargon, bizspeak, pomposity or otherwise diverting talk. Instead he gets on
with the agenda, which is, for the most part, "What's on Greg Dyke's mind?".

Over the course of 1 1/2 hours we were treated to his thoughts on the BBC,
including the infamous Sacking as associated with Lord Hutton's enquiry on
weapons of mass destruction, the State of the Union and UK democracy in
general, the Death of Newspapers, realtime reporting, Great Ideas and Berlin
Wall Moments.

Greg Dyke, of course, pulls no punches. We had uncompromising views on the
effects of the expenses row and how he thinks it will open up MPs'
accountability in the future. How democracy, as ruled by party politics, is
crumbling because of its anachronistic crony-istic nature. How Margaret
Thatcher was "better than" Blair on account of her staunch approach and
views (as opposed to Blair's lack of either). How Obama's election approach
was completely revolutionary in its adoption of new media to rally support,
directly. And how this direct engagement with voters could see the death of
newspapers as we know them.

He regrets the lack of insightful journalism in broadcast media. How news is
winning over current affairs and more considered coverage. He's also clearly
saddened, if not appalled, by the state of BBC and how it seems to be in the
hands of the trustees, not the actual management, which he clearly regards
as weak and without a clear mandate. Mind you, he had stronger words to say
about ITV's management, which he found farcical as, according to him, it
didn't seem to be run by anyone!

So - all hot stuff to be sure. More possible controversies than you can
shake a stick at. If it hadn't been an early morning breakfast meeting then
it may well have been more newsworthy. Just as well, as that made it
well-and-truly a thoroughly motivating start to the day.

I just published a short how-to video showing how you can easily install Acquia Drupal on OpenSolaris.


Sun's ISV Engineering group has been working with Drupal for a couple of years now; I also use Acquia Drupal to develop and maintain this web site, which also hosts my personal blog.  The Drupal community is amazingly vibrant and growing by leaps and bounds, and Acquia has done a nice job of commercializing the Drupal open source content management software package.  Acquia Drupal is still free, but it has some nice additions that any Drupal user or developer would want.

Anyway, check out the video; it's about 8 minutes long and walks you through the steps to find the catalog of third party applications, then get Acquia Drupal and configure it on your OpenSolaris system.  It's easy, and it just works.

Oh and by the way: props to our Sun Learning Exchange web site and staff for making it so darned easy to publish content.  Nice job, folks!

Powered by ScribeFire.

From embedded to enterprise, learn how to get the best out of Java and what's coming next.

If you have made an investment in Java applications, maybe as an independent software vendor (ISV) or as a member of a corporate development team, this event is for you.

Over the course of this day you will learn how to get the best out of your existing Java applications, be they embedded, standard or enterprise edition, as well as taking a look at Real-Time Java.

Gain a better understanding of what makes Java "tick", get closer to the experts at Sun Microsystems and learn what future developments will bring. 

Agenda

When?	What?	Who?
09:30	Registration	All
10:00	Introduction	Jay Huff – Software Marketing Director, Sun Microsystems Europe
10:15	Getting more from your existing Java applications	Simon Ritter – Java Evangelist, Sun Microsystems
11:15	Java for Business. Getting the best (out of Sun) for your Java applications.	Owen Stuart – Java Sustaining, Critical Situation Manager, Europe, Middle East and Africa
12:15	Lunch and meet the speakers
13:30	A look at Java SE embedded and real-time Java	Helen Cullen - Systems Engineer, OEM Software Sales / Andy Gilbert - Systems Engineer, OEM Software Sales
14:45	New Stuff – Java Enterprise Edition 6 and GlassFish 3	Steve Elliott – Technology Evangelist, Sun Microsystems UK
15:30	Break
15:45	More New Stuff – Java Standard Edition 7 and JavaFX	Simon Ritter - Java Evangelist Sun Microsystems & Simon Cook – Software Architect Sun Microsystems UK
16:45	Q & A	All speakers
17:00	Closing remarks	Jay Huff - Software Marketing Director, Sun Microsystems Europe

More details and Registration:

When: Tuesday December 1st 2009
Where: Sun Customer Briefing Centre, 45 King William Street, London, EC4R 9AN
Register HERE now

My Alfresco on Glassfish Walkthrough is over a year old now and is creaking at the seams a little so I plan to update it. Feel free to comment here on what the new walkthrough should cover, Glassfish v2.1 or v3? Solaris or OpenSolaris? Linux or Windows? Which DB (just MySQL or some other OSDB)?

In fact feel free to comment on anything you would like to see to do with running Alfresco (or any other (E)CMS app) on Sun gear.

Original blog entry: http://blogs.sun.com/mandy/entry/alfresco_on_glassfish_on_opensolaris

Cheers

Amanda

Busy entrepreneurs need to stay on top of all the latest startup information, but who has the time? Here's a look at what went on around blogosphere and in the news this week, in case you missed it.

Seattle-based Frazier Technology Ventures has been going strong for 44 years. Now it looks like it's at the end of a successful ride.

Getting audited by the IRS is never any fun, and it's worse when the cold eye of Uncle Sam turns to your startup. Brush up on these five classic triggers of an IRS audit.

We've all heard about bootstrapping a business, but how do you make it work for you? Here are some great ideas to get you started.

Looking for some other great startup blogs to read (besides this one, of course)? Here's a list of some that are definitely worth checking out.

"Freemium" apps are a hot topic in the startup sector these days. Here's one company that's making it work..

Flickr image courtesy of angermann.

You want to use or to know more about Sun technologies? We propose you free Webinars to improve your knowledge and skills! Find orange button on the right side.

During the "Sun day" keynote at OOW 09, John Fowler stated that we are #1 in PeopleSoft North American Payroll performance. Later Vince Carbone from our Performance Technologies group went on comparing our benchmark numbers with HP's and IBM's in BestPerf's group blog at Oracle PeopleSoft Payroll (NA) Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 and Sun Storage F5100 World Record Performance. Meanwhile Jeorg Moellenkamp had been clarifying few things in his blog at App benchmarks, incorrect conclusions and the Sun Storage F5100. Interestingly it all happened while we have no concrete evidence in our hands to show to the outside world. We got our benchmark results validated right before the Oracle OpenWorld, which gave us the ability to speak about it publicly [ and we used it to the extent we could use ]. However Oracle folks were busy with their scheduled tasks for OOW 09 and couldn't work on the benchmark results white paper until now. Finally the white paper with the NA Payroll benchmark results is available on Oracle Applications benchmark web site. Here is the URL:

        PeopleSoft Enterprise Payroll 9.0 using Oracle for Solaris on a Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000

Once again the summary of results is shown below but in a slightly different format. These numbers were extracted from the very first page of the benchmark results white papers where PeopleSoft usually highlights the significance of the results and the actual numbers that they are interested in. The results are sorted by the hourly throughput (payments/hour) in the descending order. The goal is to achieve as much hourly throughput as possible. Since there is one 16 stream result as well in the following table, exercise caution when comparing 8 stream results with 16 stream results. In general, 16 parallel job streams are supposed to yield better throughput when compared to 8 parallel job streams. Hence comparing a 16 stream number with an 8 stream number is not an exact apple-to-apple comparison. It is more like comparing an apple to another apple that is half in size. Click on the link that is underneath the hourly throughput values to open corresponding benchmark result.

Oracle PeopleSoft North American Payroll 9.0 - Number of employees: 240,000 & Number of payments: 360,000

Vendor	OS	Hardware Config	#Job Streams	Elapsed Time (min)	Hourly Throughput Payments per Hour
Sun	Solaris 10 5/09	1x Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 with 4 x 2.53 GHz SPARC64-VII Quad-Core processors and 32 GB memory 1 x Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array with 40 Flash Modules for data, indexes 1 x Sun Storage J4200 Array for redo logs	8	67.85	318,349
HP	HP-UX	1 x HP Integrity rx6600 with 4 x 1.6 GHz Intel Itanium2 9000 Dual-Core processors and 32 GB memory 1 x HP StorageWorks EVA 8100	16	68.07	317,320
HP	HP-UX	1 x HP Integrity rx6600 with 4 x 1.6 GHz Intel Itanium2 9000 Dual-Core processors and 32 GB memory 1 x HP StorageWorks EVA 8100	8	89.77	240,615*
IBM	z/OS	1 x IBM zSeries 990 model 2084-B16 with 313 Feature with 6 x IBM z990 Gen1 processors (populated: 13, used: 6) and 32 GB memory 1 x IBM TotalStorage DS8300 with dual 4-way processors	8	91.7	235,551

This is all public information -- so, feel free to draw your own conclusions. ^*At this time of writing, HP's 8 stream results were pulled out of Oracle Applications benchmark web site for some reason I do not know why. Hopefully it will show up again on the same web site soon. If it doesn't re-appear even after a month, probably we can simply assume that the result is withdrawn.

As these benchmark results were already discussed by different people in different blogs, I have nothing much to add. The only thing that I want to highlight is that this particular workload is moderately CPU intensive, but very I/O bound. Hence the better the I/O sub-system, the better the performance. Vince provided an insight on Why Sun Storage F5100 is a good option for this workload, while Jignesh Shah from our ISV-Engineering organization focused on the performance of this benchmark workload with F20 PCIe Card.

Also when dealing with NA Payroll, it is very unlikely to achieve a nice out-of-the-box performance. It requires a lot of database tuning too. As the data sets are very large, we partitioned the data in some of the very hot objects and it showed good improvement in query response times. So if you are a PeopleSoft customer running Payroll application with millions of rows of non-partitioned data, consider partitioning the data. We are currently working on a best practices blueprint document for PeopleSoft North American Payroll that presents a variety of tuning tips like these in addition to the recommended practices for F5100 flash array and flash accelerator F20 PCIe card. Stay tuned ..

Related Blog Post:

• PeopleSoft HRMS 8.9 Self-Service Benchmark on M3000 & T5120 Servers

Yesterday, I was trying to get Cut & Paste to work between various VNC clients and a VNC server that was running on a Solaris10 Update 8 x64 server.  The VNC software that was first in my PATH was from the SFWvnc package that is shipped on the Solaris Companion CD

I was quite confused:

 1) Various Google searches revealed that vncconfig must be running on the server for cut and paste to work, however, it would not start:

 $ vncconfig
 No VNC extension on display :1.0

2) The man page for vncconfig indicates that this may be caused by using version 3 Xvnc.

3) SFWvnc is version 3.3.7

4) There is no free version for Solaris x64 at www.realvnc.com (but there is a SPARC build)

So I was left trying to figure out what is there easiest way to get  Solaris/x64 VNC with Cut & Paste to work?  I wondered if I need to download RealVNC's 4.X source and build the server.  Did I need to purchase the Enterprise Edition of RealVNC, even though I was not intending to use enterprise features?

As it turns out the solution is simple: "pkgrm SFWvnc".  This SFW package has VNC 3 files from the Solaris Companion CD that compete with the VNC 4 files that come with SUNWxvnc and SUNWvncviewer in S10U5 and newer.  I've asked the owner to have SFWvnc removed from the S10U9 Solaris Companion CD.