Two Solaris releases for the T4 in 2011?

Solaris 11 is not the only Solaris release we can expect to see in 2011. The next update of Solaris 10, update 10 or Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 which seems to be what Oracle are aiming for in both name and release date is also coming in 2011. Earlier posts have included some of the expected content but the name and release window recently surfaced.

I found this in a publicly available bug report:

                Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 s10x_u10wos_02 X86
Copyright(c) 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
                    Assembled 22 November 2010
     Early Access Build for Evaluation and Test Purposes Only.
         NOT SUPPORTED FOR PRODUCTION USE.  Not patchable.

With the 8/11 target it seems that Oracle wants to release the update in time before Oracle World 2011, perhaps to have a new Solaris release to talk about in the sessions but it also seem likely that it will support the upcoming SPARC T4 (Yosemite Falls) processor that could be launched at the same time ( Oracles road maps have pointed to the second half of 2011 and Rick Hetherington stated in the recent interview that it was less than 12 month away ).

Another interesting thing is that in the Oracle roadmap, Solaris 11 was plotted at the same time as the SPARC T4, sometime in the second half of 2011. Could this mean both Solaris 11 and Solaris 10 8/11 will be released at the same time and at Oracle world 2011? Given all the announcement at last Oracle world it would make sense.

Take a look at the slides of John Fowler, Executive Vice President of Systems, page 8 for the roadmap.

This gives some more substance to Fowlers statement that they will continue to produce Solaris 10 updates for some time, the timeframe for the release was probably not very hard to guess but it is interesting that there now seems to be a preliminary name. It looks like next year will be an interesting year for both Solaris and SPARC.

Here is some information on some of the expected content of the update:
Solaris 10 update 10 update

More SPARC T4/T5 information

Oracle has made an interview with Rick Hetherington, Oracle vice president of hardware development available. There is quite a bit of information about the future and development of the SPARC processor, well worth a read.

"Going forward, the SPARC T4 is less than 12 months away. So that's pretty quick. And there's a reason behind that. We wanted to get more single thread performance into the SPARC T-series systems sooner rather than later. So we developed a new core for the SPARC T4 that brings together the combination of throughput performance through threading as well as really high-speed single thread performance. It's really breakthrough technology for us. Referring back to the timeline for development that we have, we developed that core and that technology back in 2006/2007 and we'll be delivering that to the market in 2011.

And then the SPARC T5 will have 16 cores as opposed to the eight cores that we have in the SPARC T4, in 28 nanometer technology. As we go forward with each of these new introductions we'll make sure that the interfaces that deal with memory are common and are contemporary with the sweet spot of memory technology."

Read the whole article here.

Two more well known ZFS developers quit

Previously since the Oracle acquisition the father of ZFS Jeff Bonwick and the co-lead in the project Bill more have left the company.

I know that the ZFS is created by a team but I had missed that another two well known developes also have left Oracle and joined DTrace creator Adam Leventhal at Delphix. This time it is George Wilson and Matthew Arhens.

Delphix welcomes Matt Ahrens and George Wilson:
"George and Matt bring an amazing knowledge of ZFS — the lower, and upper halves respectively — and are also just great engineers who are already contributing tangibly to the the success of Delphix."

Best of luck all three and Delphix. I hope Oracle has or finds people to finish the remaining large development areas of ZFS such as the block pointer rewrite project which I know Matthew have worked with.

Adam Leventhal also quits Oracle

Another bright mind leaves Oracle

ZFS encryption at ${HOME}

A nice addition to easily use of ZFS encryption for home directories will be available in a future version of Solaris 11. This will allow you to have your password as key for your home dataset which is automatically used at login:

"For users with local ZFS storage we want to provide a very simple and as transparent as possible way of using encrypted ZFS datasets. The target for this is laptops and systems with local ZFS storage for the users home directory.

The goal is to provide as seemless as possible a way to have an encrypted home directory and additional encrypted datasets below the home directory. A new PAM module pam_zfs_key.so will be introduced. This module supports only pam_sm_setcred(3PAM) and pam_sm_chauthtok(3PAM), pam_sm_authenticate(3PAM) is provided but always returns PAM_IGNORE.

It assumes that the users login passphrase is also the passphrase used to protect thier ZFS encrypted home directory and will ensure that when users change their password the passphrase used for deriving the wrapping key for their encrypted ZFS home directory is changed as well."

Bugid: 6983112

Solaris 10 update 10 update

Some additional details on the next Solaris 10 update have surfaced, they compliment the list in my previous post. No huge updates, Solaris 10 should not be seeing any ground breaking changes this late in its lifespan but good additions besides the bug fixes.

• IPfilter IPv6 NAT support
• 10Gb Ethernet support for Mellanox ConnectX-2 chipset
• SSH Support for ChrootDirectory and ConnectTimeout
• PSARC/2008/256 Native LDAP standalone tools (Duckwater Phase 0)
• Updated FireFox to 3.6.8+ and Thunderbird 3.1+

The ZFS update should include bits similar to snv_148 which among other things include the following:

• RAID-Z/mirror hybrid allocator
• Missing log import (PSARC/2010/292) (CR 6733267)
• ZIL synchronicity PSARC/2010/108
• read-only import (PSARC 2010/306)

There might also be an update to the bundled samba which is a bit overdue. This was delayed earlied due to change of licenses but that should now have been solved. This might slip again, as it did previously, but it looks like a 3.5+ version of samba will be included.

Update:

I should probably have mentioned that it seems that the name for the release will be Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 which means it is scheduled for a release around August/September 2011. This would be just one or two months before Oracle World so it seems highly likely it will support the expected SPARC T4. This new release cycle with one release per year seems like a better fit for enterprise customers, Solaris 10 9/10 is probably not in many datacenter yet.

Solaris 10 update 10

ZFS Feature/Dist table

For a advanced, low cost, data consistent storage server ZFS still has very little competition. The main challenge today is to choose the correct distribution for your needs. We have S7000/Fishworks and NexentaStor, but both are appliances and cost a fair bit of money, at lest for anything but trivial deployments (>18TB). I put together a table with ZFS features, storage features and cost/support status, included are the larger distributions with Solaris/OpenSolaris kernel today, FreeBSD and OpenSolaris 2009.06 as a reference.

It's not much of a surprise that Solaris 11 Express comes out with the most complete feature set, but it also has a cost of $1000/year for up to 8 cores (1 socket, non Oracle HW) for anything but testing and development. That is cheap for a file server with all the features ZFS provides but for home filers it can be a bit too much.

This table is of course subject to change. Both Nexenta and FreeBSD will surly continue to update ZFS at least to the point were Oracle stopped releasing the source. The available source from Oracle does not include some of the features in the table, for example ZFS crypto and probably a fair amount of bug fixes.

Release	S11 Exp	NCP	FreeBSD	OSOL
Free for use in production	N	Y	Y	Y
Commercial support available	Y	N1	N1	N1
Zpool version	31	26	14	14
ZFS Diff	Y	N	N	N
RAID-Z/mirror hybrid allocator	Y	N	N	N
Improved 'zfs list' performance	Y	N	N	N
Encryption	Y	N	N	N
Multiple vdev replacements	Y	N	N	N
zdb w decomp, checksum, raidz	Y	N	N	N
Low priority resilver	Y	N	N	N
Deduplication	Y	Y	N	N
Tripple-parity raidz	Y	Y	N	N
Log device removal	Y	Y	N	N
Improved scrub stats	Y	Y	N	N
Improved snapshot deleteion performance	Y	Y	N	N
zpool recover	Y	Y	N	N
resilver prefetch	Y	Y	N	N
zpool split	Y	Y	N	N
zil synchronicity	Y	Y	N	N
ZIL	Y	Y	Y	Y
L2ARC	Y	Y	Y	Y
Checksum	Y	Y	Y	Y
Snapshot	Y	Y	Y	Y
Clones	Y	Y	Y	Y
COMSTAR	Y	Y	N	Y
In kernel CIFS/SMB	Y	Y	N	Y

1. No support from sponsoring project or company, may be available elsewhere.

Quick Solaris 11 Express walkthrough

This is a quick command/output walkthrough of some example administrative tasks in Solaris 11 Express. You can just skim thought it or run the command yourself on a test installation. It uses zfs-crypto, deduplication, zones, crossbow, ipadm, zonestat and pkg.

Create a alternate boot environment by cloning the current filesystem state for an quick and easy rollback option:
# beadm create initial

Set up static IP and add a persistent route:
# ipadm create-addr -T static -a local=10.0.10.242/24 bge0/v4
# ipadm show-addr
ADDROBJ TYPE STATE ADDR
lo0/v4 static ok 127.0.0.1/8
bge0/v4 static ok 10.0.10.242/24
lo0/v6 static ok ::1/128

# route -p add default 10.0.10.1
add net default: gateway 10.0.10.1
add persistent net default: gateway 10.0.10.1

Add mail notifications on hardware/FMA and SMF state changes:
# pkg install smtp-notify
# svccfg setnotify -g from-online,to-maintenance mailto:admin@somehost.com
# svccfg setnotify problem-diagnosed,problem-updated mailto:admin@somehost.com

Install some utilities from the network repository:
# pkg install terminal/screen mercurial nmap

Create an encrypted dataset for the secret project:
# zfs create -o encryption=on -o mountpoint=/vault rpool/vault
Enter passphrase for 'rpool/vault': ********
Enter again: ********

Add a dataset with deduplication:

zfs create -o dedup=on -o mountpoint=/export/vbox rpool/vbox

Add a NFS/SMB share area and ignore the ZIL for asynchronous writes in favor of performance(unsafe):
# zfs create -o mountpoint=/export/share rpool/share
# zfs set sharesmb=on rpool/share
# zfs set sharesmb=name=share rpool/share
# zfs set sharenfs=on rpool/share
# zfs set sync=disabled rpool/share

Create a virtual switch with crossbow and two virtual interfaces for zones with bandwidth management and assigned to different CPUs:
# dladm create-etherstub etherstub01
# dladm create-vnic -l etherstub01 vnic_zone01
# dladm create-vnic -l etherstub01 vnic_zone02
# dladm set-linkprop -p maxbw=10M -p cpus=3 vnic_zone01
# dladm set-linkprop -p maxbw=10M -p cpus=4 vnic_zone02

Configure and install zone capped to 50% of a CPU located on ZFS and using the virtual interface:
# zfs create -o mountpoint=/zones -o compression=on rpool/zones

# zonecfg -z zone01
zonecfg:zone01> create
zonecfg:zone01> set zonepath=/zones/zone01
zonecfg:zone01> set ip-type=exclusive
zonecfg:zone01> ad capped-cpu
zonecfg:zone01:capped-cpu> set ncpus=0.5
zonecfg:zone01:capped-cpu>end
zonecfg:zone01> add capped-memory
zonecfg:zone01:capped-memory> set swap=2G
zonecfg:zone01:capped-memory> end
zonecfg:zone01> add net
zonecfg:zone01:net> set physical=vnic_zone01
zonecfg:zone01:net> end
zonecfg:zone01> commit

# zoneadm -z zone01 install
A ZFS file system has been created for this zone.
Publisher: Using solaris (http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release/ ).
Image: Preparing at /zones/zone02/root.
Sanity Check: Looking for 'entire' incorporation.
Installing: Core System (output follows)

# zoneadm -z zone01 boot
# zonestat 5

Collecting data for first interval...
Interval: 1, Duration: 0:00:05
SUMMARY                    Cpus/Online: 4/4   Physical: 8063M    Virtual: 11.8G
                    ----------CPU---------- ----PHYSICAL----- -----VIRTUAL-----
              ZONE  USED %PART  %CAP %SHRU  USED   PCT  %CAP  USED   PCT  %CAP
           [total]  0.76 19.2%     -     -  946M 11.7%     - 1960M 16.2%     -
          [system]  0.10 2.54%     -     -  774M 9.60%     - 1816M 15.0%     -
            global  0.66 16.6%     -     -  133M 1.65%     -  113M 0.94%     -
           zone01  0.00 0.00% 0.03%     - 38.1M 0.47%     - 30.0M 0.24% 1.46%

Enjoy the new faster scrub/resilver that should have less of impact on other workloads to the pool. It also has a more detailed output:
# zpool scrub rpool
# zpool status rpool
pool: rpool
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub in progress since Sat Nov 20 02:21:51 2010
3.22G scanned out of 19.0G at 35.8M/s, 0h7m to go
0 repaired, 16.95% done
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
rpool ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t0d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0

Check if any updates are available:
# pkg update -n
No updates available for this image.