thinking sysadmin

• VMware to release ESX 3i for free next week – Yeah, the title pretty much says it all; I guess that’s one way to compete with the price of Hyper-V. Now what were those 3i vs 3.5 limitations?

• Flash Forward – Jay Kidd, CTO of NetApp blogs that “NetApp is in the process of certifying enterprise-grade SSDs that you can use in our existing storage shelves.” No dates or pricing announced yet, of course, but he does make an excellent point about SSDs in storage arrays: “For the next few years, you won’t be using a lot of flash capacity in your systems, not just because of the costs. At 10x or more the IOP rate of hard disks, it only takes a small number of SSDs in disk slots to saturate the performance of the array controller. It’s like trying to fly a model airplane in your living room – you’ll run into a system performance wall long before you hit capacity limits. This is another reason that flash as cache is economically efficient – it puts the necessarily small amount of very fast storage at a point in the architecture where you can best exploit the performance.” Not unlike how Sun suggests using SSDs with ZFS. (Seen at Blocks and Files.)

• Storage virtualization doesn’t exist – This needed to be said: “Virtualization.info doesn’t cover the so called storage virtualization because at today this term doesn’t mean anything. Unlike what happens for hardware virtualization, OS virtualization and application virtualization, the storage vendors seems unable to find an agreement on the definition. The term is abused in almost every press announcement and it can refer to at least ten different approaches.”

• Elektronkind: OpenSolaris 2008.11 – A Preview For The Storage Admin – A look at upcoming storage technologies in OpenSolaris 2008.11, including ZFS, iSCSI, NDMP, COMSTAR, AVS and SAM-QFS. These products really set OpenSolaris apart from Linux distributions, although I wonder how official this list is, and have some doubts about the status of some of the projects. For example, there doesn’t appear to be much activity on the SAM-QFS OpenSolaris project, although maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place. (Seen at c0t0d0s0.org.)
• Ruling: SCO owes Novell $2.54 million from SCO-Sun SVRX deal – Interesting excerpt: “Judge Kimball also reviewed SCO’s agreement with Sun and found that some of the terms exceeded SCO’s licensing authority. Through the agreement, SCO lifted the confidentiality provisions of Sun’s 1994 SVRX deal with Novell even though SCO was not permitted to do so without Novell’s explicit consent. The judge concluded that lifting of the SVRX confidentiality provisions was not incidental to a UnixWare license and was consequently not permissible. This raises some intriguing legal questions about OpenSolaris, which includes SVRX code that we now know SCO clearly had no right to let Sun open.” I wonder if we’ll be hearing more about this in the coming months.
• Interview: IT consumerization and the future of higher ed – Another interesting piece on Ars Technica from today, an interview with Oren Sreebny of the University of Washington, whose best bits obliquely refer to the challenges of miasma computing and information security. Quotes: “Lately we’ve been looking at Google and Microsoft offerings for commodity stuff, and one of the things we deal with in some of our research [departments] is government regulations about ‘exporting munitions.’ So one of the manifestations of those government regulations is that you cannot store your data outside the US if you’re working on some types of government-funded projects. Google has said, ‘We can’t guarantee that anybody’s stuff in particular won’t be in a datacenter that’s located outside the US, so don’t bring that stuff to us,’ which is exactly what I’d be saying if I was them. So we have to figure out, as we start to move in those directions, what we do about that.” Also: “[Separate identity principals for people who are working on sensitive data] is an interesting conversation because, in many ways we’ve spent the last decade trying to integrate people’s identity, and do single-sign-on, and not make them have lots of separate accounts in separate places. And in many ways it really goes against the grain to step back from that, but maybe it’s time to do that.”

• VM HA – service console networking, isolation behavior – and other “under the covers stuff” – An overview of how VMware ESX’s High Availability works under the hood – making it much more apparent to me how important file locking is to HA’s functioning. (I’d love to see an overview of how file locking does – or doesn’t – differ on VMFS versus NFS datastores.)
• Why Upgrade? – DanT on what’s new in Sun Grid Engine 6.0 through 6.2.
• Part II: Since NFSv4 is Stateful It Must Be Less Robust, Right? – “Just because CIFS is old and busted, that doesn’t mean NFSv4 is.” Just kidding, that’s not an actual quote. But I think it’s a reasonable summary of the piece.
• HP – Performance-Optimized Data Center – Yet another vendor produces a data center-in-a-box product – which isn’t to say that there isn’t good technology inside of HP’s product. I wonder if container data centers will come down-market to the point where they become a reasonable alternative for new office building construction instead of building a conventional server room. (Seen at Data Center Knowledge.)
• Understanding NIC Utilization in VMware ESX – Scott Lowe comes through again with another practical piece on networking and VMware ESX.

There’s nothing like a long summer weekend followed by an on-site consultant to keep you from updating your blog. But on the bright side, I didn’t have to link to the notebook SSDs are dead – no they’re not kerfluffle.

• NetApp finds NAS could mean ‘never accessed storage’ – “According to a USENIX presentation, 90% of data on NetApp’s networked storage systems was untouched over a 3-month period, raising the issue of whether it would be better placed on cheaper storage.” I would find some irony in that cheaper storage being tape.
• zfs un-benchmarking – “Our rationale for testing was to finally get some numbers that we can provide to users/customers about real zfs performance. There is a huge amount of (largely uncontested) information (emanating mainly from Sun and its agents) that zfs is a very fast file system. We want to test this, on real, live hardware, and report. Well, we can’t do the latter due to Sun’s licensing, but we did do the former. Paraphrasing Mark Twain: ‘Rumors of zfs’s performance have been greatly exaggerated.’” When Joe Landman blogs about performance, I take what he has to say seriously, but given the stability problems he notes, I wonder if – as he suggests – that driver issues are a factor here, and we’re not seeing a generic ZFS issue. (Seen at InsideHPC.)
• Self-protecting archive for SharePoint – “A new archiving product from BridgeHead Software automatically moves older, infrequently-accessed SharePoint items to cheaper archive media and cuts down the SharePoint backup burden.” HSM for SharePoint, apparently? Sounds interesting.
• Since NFSv4 is Stateful It Must Be Less Robust, Right? – “The short answer is no.” Interesting summary of how locking works under NFSv4; although I haven’t used NFSv4, this sounds like a massive improvement over previous versions – can I get the time that I spent debugging locking problems on Linux NFS servers back now?
• Storage Opens Up – Sun releases new JBODs and upgrades Thumper’s hardware. Given that I heard rumors of the Thumper expansion shelves (J4500) maybe a year ago, I’m surprised it took them so long to come out. And is it just me, or do the J4200 and J4400 look a little like someone else’s boxes rebranded?

• The Hitz report – Robin Harris at StorageMojo on the Sun-NetApp lawsuit:
  

  NetApp’s biggest misperception is that WAFL is somehow central to the success they are enjoying today. That was true about 10 years ago. Guys, your average F500 CIO today could care less about WAFL.

  NetApp is growing because they offer a compelling value proposition of quality products, relevant services and worldwide support. WAFL certainly supports that, but as NetApp execs note much of their recent success is due to the integration software that NetApp now offers.

  WAFL is a small piece of the picture. Sun could copy it line for line and still not have a quarter of what NetApp offers.

  NetApp faces challenges. Storage commoditization threatens all vendors traditional 60% gross margins. The GX integration is problematic and the bottom line benefit uncertain. EMC’s move into cloud file services is a clever flanking strategy.

  An interesting opinion summed up nicely, I think.

• Saving and Restoring ZFS Snapshots to and from Amazon S3 – A ZFS to S3 workaround for the lack of persistent storage on EC2.

• Prediction: Citrix will drop the open source Xen hypervisor for Hyper-V. The rest of the open source world drops Xen for KVM. – Lengthy speculation about the future of Xen now that Hyper-V is out. If this turns out to be correct, I think it leaves Sun in a particularly awkward spot, given that the work they’ve done on integrating Xen with Solaris. (Seen at virtualization.info and vinternals.)

• Daemonic Dispatches: Dissecting SimpleDB BoxUsage – Colin Percival takes a critical look at Amazon’s SimpleDB pricing scheme.

• S3 data corruption: “We’ve isolated this issue to a single load balancer that was brought into service at 10:55pm PDT on Friday, 6/20. It was taken out of service at 11am PDT Sunday, 6/22. While it was in service it handled a small fraction of Amazon S3′s total requests in the US. Intermittently, under load, it was corrupting single bytes in the byte stream. When the requests reached Amazon S3, if the Content-MD5 header was specified, Amazon S3 returned an error indicating the object did not match the MD5 supplied. When no MD5 is specified, we are unable to determine if transmission errors occurred, and Amazon S3 must assume that the object has been correctly transmitted.” (Seen at Daemonic Dispatches.)