thinking sysadmin

Since Sun and Amazon removed the limit on the number of OpenSolaris 2008.05 instances able to run on EC2, I’ve been curious – and a little bothered – by the fact that the 2008.05 AMI is 32-bit only. Curious because OpenSolaris shouldn’t have any issues running on a 64-bit EC2 instance (there are other 64-bit OpenSolaris AMIs available on EC2, after all), and a little bothered because there have been long-standing reports of trouble running Solaris on 32-bit architectures, which makes me hesitant to invest much effort in a 32-bit OpenSolaris EC2 environment.

Well, perhaps a 64-bit AMI is forthcoming – I think this is still a beta program – and perhaps Sun’s just trying to save us a buck or two, since the cheapest 64-bit EC2 instance is four times as expensive per hour as the cheapest 32-bit instance.

• Less known Solaris Features: CacheFS – Joerg Moellenkamp at c0t0d0s0.org offers another installment of his excellent Less known Solaris Features series. Of note: “In the recent days there was some discussion about the declaration of the End-of-Feature status for CacheFS which will lead to the announcement of the removal of CacheFS. After a few days of discussion the ARC decided in favour of the removal.” While I’ve never personally used CacheFS – and see no use case for it on the horizon – I’m not thrilled to see it slated for removal as it does sound like it serves an important role. Perhaps ADM or SAM-QFS will become more general to support this style of HSM as well in the future.

According to a blog post on blogs.sun.com, the capacity limit for OpenSolaris 2008.05 on EC2 has been removed.

The blog entry makes it sound like you no longer need to register with Sun to use OpenSolaris on EC2, but that doesn’t appear to be the case – I only see the AMI in my private instances, and the details on the image seem to confirm this.
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• 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.”

• 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.)

For grins, I tried a quick-and-dirty BFU of a SXCE 79 instance running on EC2 to the latest nightly build this morning. I roughly followed Ben Rockwood’s BFU instructions and didn’t do anything to resolve conflicts beyond running acr. On reboot, it looks like the system panicked – I presume the reason is probably somewhere in here. Console dump after the jump for the curious.
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Chuck’s got another, uh, thought-provoking blog post up, More Examples Of Why Server Vendors Just Don’t Get Storage, surely intended to ruffle a few feathers. And he does raise some really good points: Most server vendors need more of an SSD strategy than just making a flash drive an option (it’s how you use it, not that you have it!). And as big a fan as I am of ZFS and Sun’s storage options in general, to win in the “enterprise” (and not just, say, HPC) Sun needs to pull everything together into Solaris (from OpenSolaris) and make it less of a DIY operation.
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There’s been a lot of noise from the storage industry about flash recently – in particular, noise from EMC and Sun, both of whom recently announced storage products using flash, EMC in January and Sun earlier this month. Below are my thoughts on what EMC and Sun are doing, as well as what NetApp might do. Since I see a fair amount of visitors from all three companies here, if I’ve got something about your employer wrong, please correct me in the comments.
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• Jonathan’s Blog: Anything But a Flash in the Pan – Jonathan Schwartz on Sun’s soon-to-be-released (late this year) flash drives. Quote: “ZFS will transparently incorporate Flash into the storage hierarchy of a running system, using the microprocessor cache for the most performance sensitive tasks, DRAM for the next, then Flash, then disk (then ultimately tape).” Speaking of tiered storage, I wonder how flash drives would work within a SAM-QFS implementation – and if SAM-QFS is destined to wither in the shadow of ZFS: Sure it’s open source now, but where is it going these days?