Oracle ACEs talking about SPARC and Solaris at UKOUG TECH16 in Birmingham

The UKOUG TECH16 Event is taking place in Birmingham from 5. till 7. December

Full agenda and registration at http://www.tech16.ukoug.org/

Take a look at this 3 Sessions about SPARC and Solaris

Oracle SPARC & Solaris Past, Present, Future
Monday, 05/12/2016 13:10

Philippe Fierens (Oracle ACE)
Co-presenter(s):
Bjoern Rost (Oracle ACE Director)
Marcel Hofstetter (Oracle ACE Associate)


Increase Efficiency of Solaris Operations & Hardware Life Cycle
Monday, 05/12/2016 14:10

Marcel Hofstetter (Oracle ACE Associate)


Oracle SPARC M7 & In-Memory Deep Dive
Wednesday, 07/12/2016 11:30

Kamil Stawiarski (Oracle ACE)


See you in Birmingham!

My Favorite Oracle Solaris Sessions at #doag2016 Conference in Nuremberg

The German Oracle User Group (DOAG) Conference is the largest Oracle Conferene in Europe.
Taking place each Year in Mid November.

Here the links to my favorite Solaris Sessions, Wednesday, 16.11.

11:00 Room Stockholm Oracle Solaris 11 Zonen - Spezialitäten
          Marcel Hofstetter

12:00 Room Budapest Less Known Features of Solaris
          Jörg Möllenkamp

13:00 Room Stockholm Oracle Solaris - The Next Generation
          Joost Pronk & Franz Haberhauer

16:00 RoomStockholm End to End Diagnostics with Oracle Solaris Observability
          Eve Kleinknecht

See you in Nuremberg

Performance Comparison SPARC T4 and SPARC S7

SPARC S7
JomaSoft replaces the SPARC T4-1 Server with the new SPARC S7-2 Server (with 2 sockets / 8 cores each at 4.26Ghz).

Read more about the SPARC S7-2 Server

Comparison

We created a 3GB / 1 core LDom on our SPARC T4-1 Server running Solaris 11.3 SRU11 with all data stored on a SAN Disk. Inside the LDom we installed our VDCF application and loaded datacenter configuration into the VDCF sqlite database. Next we executed datacenter analysis like patch comparison, calculated migration possibilities and server configuration consistency checks. The analysis are traditional single thread workload.

After the tests on the SPARC T4-1 we migrated our LDom to the new SPARC S7-2 Server. This allowed us to compare the systems using the same Operating System, Setup and Data, to make sure we compare “apple to apple”.

The results for our workload showed a 2x faster performance on the SPARC S7-2 Server. We are very happy with this results. This workload did not use the Software In Silicon features, only performed better because of the new CPU architecture (higher frequency, more and better CPU cache and memory).

In my view the SPARC S7-2 Server is the ideal platform for customers to replace their old SPARC hardware with an excellent price / performance ratio.

How to change Solaris Zones configurations online

I assume you are aware that Solaris Zones are one of the most valuable features of Solaris since years. In this post I focus on the "Live Zone Reconfiguration" feature available since

Solaris 11.2 for Solaris Zones and since Solaris 11.3 for Kernel Zones. CPU pools, filesystems, network and disk configurations can be changed while Solaris Zones are running.

1. Limit CPU usage of a Solaris Zone using dedicated-cpu

By default Solaris Zones share the CPUs with the global and all other local Zones.
Our sample Zone currently uses 16 virtual CPUs.

# zlogin v0131 psrinfo | wc -l

16

We can now assign 4 dedicated virtual CPUs to be used by this Zone only.

# zonecfg -z v0131 -r "add dedicated-cpu; set ncpus=4; end"

zone 'v0131': Checking: Adding dedicated-cpu

zone 'v0131': Applying the changes

# zlogin v0131 psrinfo | wc -l

4
The “zonecfg -r” changes the configuration of the running Zone only.
Make sure to run the command once again to make the configuration persistent for the next Zone reboot.

# zonecfg -z v0131 "add dedicated-cpu; set ncpus=4; end"

2. Create and mount an additional ZFS filesystem

# zfs create v0131_data/myapp

# zonecfg -z v0131 -r "add fs; set type=zfs; set dir=/myapp; set special=v0131_data/myapp; end"

zone 'v0131': Checking: Mounting fs dir=/myapp

zone 'v0131': Applying the changes

# zlogin v0131 mount | grep myapp

/myapp on /myapp read/write/setuid/devices/rstchown/nonbmand/exec/xattr/atime/zone=v0131/nozonemod/sharezone=4/dev=d50045 on Fri Jun 10 11:56:19 2016

And make it persistent

# zonecfg -z v0131 "add fs; set type=zfs; set dir=/myapp; set special=v0131_data/myapp; end"

Adding network interfaces and disk devices are similar to the samples above.