Dibbler's Net

As part of Sun’s Datacenter and new multi-core servers they have released LDOM’s (Logical Domains) which pair well with Solaris Zone’s. As with any new technology it’s nice to have functional assessments. Sun has posted the above linked blueprint which details overall sever capacity and functionality when using virtualization. Virtual is the current buzzword, but at the same time you are getting more cpu’s and really more cores per cpu so there is a lot of processing power. The old belief of one application per physical box needs to change. As the blueprint shows when using an application like tomcat there is a real advantage to running more copies of tomcat with a smaller dedicated amount of cpu and memory then to run one large instance of Tomcat. As many applications and languages are not core capable so putting them in virtual servers make it more compatible and better performance. Now I don’t want to give away the big results but the pdf is worth reading as they are able to almost double TPS with their web based application on a single server.

Good to keep in mind before buying your next application server.

D~

TWIT (This week in Tech) is normally a good podcast that I enjoy hearing. This weeks episode is exceptional. Some really good stories about the early days of computers and operating systems. The one quote I found really interesting was the comment that “If it works ship it”. The comparison being that IBM worked for perfection so they shipped less and through that Microsoft did better. I have always come from a policy of when you do something do it right. I get horribly frustrated with products that don’t work, but I do get more frustrated by vendors who never ship new releases. Looking back at those days you can easily see how MS stayed ahead of the early market by shipping what worked not what was perfect.

If you grew up with DOS then I recommend you listen to this week’s episode.

D~

Symantec last year really tried to enter the Server Provisioning and Data Center Management with it’s product of Veritas Provisioning Manager 5.x Since 2007 Symantec has really stalled on Unix software development and features. I mentioned this before when comparing Clustering software. It really seems that Symantec has lost it’s vision on what used to be Veritas’ core markets.

So Friday I had the opportunity to see Sun’s upgrade to their N1 product. The new Sun xVM Provisioning. Now xVM to Sun is a category of products including the recent buy of VirtualBox. For anyone who had to use N1 you will be amazed at where Sun has come. The demo I saw was the 1.1 version of the Product.

So in comparison xVM does almost everything VPM does. It does lack full drive imaging that VPM has. But in real life use we had issues with that VPM feature. For bare metal provisioning xVM supports software they give you for remote proxies that do DHCP, BOOTP, and all the other needs for remote network OS imaging. They also support direct IPMI for handling auto server reboots and remote firmware updates (which is a really nice feature).

xVM will also support LDOM’s and zone’s in 2.0 which VPM still won’t really support at all and doesn’t plan on it. It also had real issues with T1000 hardware and it’s mini-os. There is also alot riding on the new Knowledge base portion they plan to have in 2.0.

Overall both products do OS installs using Jumpstart but xVM does it a bit better. They will both push software and run custom scripts. Both will do rollbacks but in a very different way. I liked what I saw for compliance reporting by xVM but the ability to do file level system and image comparisons worked well in VPM.

Overall Sun showed off a really nice version 1 product that almost makes you forget how complicated N1 provisioning was. At the same time look how few updates or new features are coming from Symantec in an area that should be dynamic and constantly growing right now. A year ago Symantec said that the Datacenter was their big core market moving forward. Somehow we just haven’t seen this happen.

This is now the second Sun vs Symantec product look I have done. So am I just hating Symantec and loving on Sun ? I would say no. I think that like many large corporate buys Symantec bought Veritas for a core group of products and customers. It seems that Unix and Datacenter were not that core. Sun on the other hand is going into a second life of sorts on putting out good hardware and challenging the software market. Right now no one is really challenging them in this area. Remember at one point people declared Sun dead and was asking who would buy them.

D~

Caveat. The opinions above are my personal thoughts. I have used VPM 5.x and have seen a product demo of xVM 1.1 so I haven’t gotten as deep and dirty into xVM.