Notes for a live roll out of Sun Ray's and VDI

So for the last 8 hours I've been rolling out Sun Ray's at one of my customers in Mexico City.  Just wanted to write some of my thoughts down

1. sunray-servers and sunray-config-servers do not need reverse lookup working
2. Sunray-servers and sunray-config-server do need a domain attached with the IP address
3. Do not have 2 different DHCP scopes on the same subnet...Werid things can happen
4. Sun Ray's don't take a lot of bandwidth if done correctly.

I'll write more l8r, but that's it for now.

Solaris 10 U6 is here

I know this will be the hot topic on all of the blogs today, but I'll add mine as well.

U6 is here. What does U6 provide?

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0547/ghgdx?a=view

Short list if you don't want to go to the link:

• ZFS Root Pool or ZFS boot
• ZFS Command improvements
• Lock stat provider for Dtrace
• Zones: Upgrade on Attach YEA
• Zones: Different Default routes on shared IP's
• Zones: ZFS permitted as Zone Root
• x64: Support for 256 Processors
• Adobe Reader: Finally
• Flash Player: WOW
• And Much Much more

I'm upgrading all my systems today, and will let you know how that goes either late tonight or tomorrow.

USB using NTFS...Problems mounting, I think NOT

Had a customer, Thanks Kevin, wanting to mount NTFS USB drive on Solaris.

He downloaded these to packages from here

FSWfsmisc FSWpart

and look at that NTFS on Solaris.

FAA using Solaris?

How the FAA Is Bringing Its Air Traffic Systems into the 21st Century

Wow, since Solaris is dead, I'd be afraid to fly.  NOT...This is a great feather in the Solaris hat.

Sun's
open-source OpenSolaris/ZFS/SunFire server/Thumper storage
infrastructure—which features built-in, state-of-the-art virtualization
capability—was a key building block on which the FAA IT evaluation
group settled. Some of the new software is already being used in the
air traffic system; ZFS (Sun's open-source Zettabyte File System) is
being used in the FAA's air traffic data center.



"The FAA uses a large quantity of Sun Solaris servers in a variety of configurations to support some of our noncritical business applications,"
Andy Isaksen, manager of the Communications Infrastructure Engineering
Team for NADIN and architect of the original mainframe system, said.
"ZFS is being used on at least one service within the Air Traffic
Organization Enterprise Data Center."

Is Solarid Dead? Part 2 The Community on Attack.

Wow, I'm amazed at the out cry of both Linux and Solaris users responding to Zemlin's remarks. Waking a sleeping giant comes to mind.

Check out the comments in these links:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/09/24/39NF-linux-killing-solaris_1.html#commentForm
http://www.osnews.com/comments/20324

My favorite here is:

So, the Linux camp: why attack Solaris all the time? If you are threatened by Solaris (but want it's technology), you really dont have to attack. It is not the right way to get it's hot technology. Why not let Solaris be? Why are you being such a great pr*cks all the time? Why is it ok to bully others? Can someone explain the Linux culture of attacking people and companies and OS? Is it because of Linus Torvalds?

Stating that Linux scales badly above 4-8 cpu was not really correct maybe. It is better to state that Linux doesnt scale well above 16 cores:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8769
Unless you do scientic number crunching, then there is a special Linux kernel tailored to that, allowing massively many CPUs, but it can do nothing else than that.


I dont know if you have seen what Andrew Morton says about Linux kernel? It is really buggy (beyond repair?)
http://lwn.net/Articles/285088/


Of course, there are links that showing to migrate from Solaris to Linux is better. But for instance this link, I think doesnt tell the whole picture:
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,s...
If you migrated old Solaris 8 Sparc machines to new Solaris 10 machines then you would also see a big performance boost. Possibly even more a boost than going to RHEL as this link shows (Solaris on T1 Niagara CPU being 50 times faster than Linux on AMD opteron):

http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,s...

I wish that the NY Times allowed comments. So the Community to get there voice heard

Is Solaris Dead? Let's ask Paul Krill

Recently, there seems to have been an attack on Solaris being dead. Two articles here and here make such a claim.

While everyone is entitled to there own opinion, I have a hard time with these articles. Why? because the Authors ask a single person, Who works for the Linux foundation, and takes his word as the truth. There are no facts presented in the articles. Jim Zemlin spends his career talking up Linux. That's his job.

The first big issue I have with the articale, is that he distances Linux from Unix. Last time I checked, when working in Linux, you use ls, chmod, chown, ps, just like every other unix does. So why the distancing? What's wrong with Unix?

Issue two.

Sun officials believe the 16-year-old Solaris platform remains a pivotal, innovative platform. But at the Linux Foundation, there is a no-conciliatory stance; the attitude there is to tell Solaris and Sun to move out of the way. "The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows," says foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. "It is not Unix or Solaris."

In the above paragraph, Mr. Krill, states that Sun officials beleive the Solaris is Pivotal and innovative, but the LF sais it's not. No facts, No number, no studies, he takes the words of Jim Zemlin, over the words of Sun's executives. WHY?

Issue Three.

Linux also is less costly to run, Zemlin claims. Sun, he declared, should just move over to Linux. Zemlin also held out little hope for other IBM's AIX and Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX Unix platforms. "It's certainly true that Unix is on the decline," he says.

Less Costly to Run Linux...HMMMM. Let's take a look at that. From here we see a 3+ socket box costs $3,600 dollars list to support for 3 years for solaris x86. I searched for support from the Linux Foundation's website, but couldn't find any. HMMM...Ok so let's use Red Hat's support. From here for 3+ sockets would be $4,047 dollars for 3 years. So, where is the Cheaper part? I'm confused.

Issue three:

Thanks to its strong support of the x86 hardware architecture, "in terms of overall volume, Linux is just a much higher volume product than Solaris ever was," says Al Gillen, an IDC analyst. IDC data show that worldwide Linux shipments in 2006 were about 2.4 million in 2006 and nearly 2.7 million in 2007. By contrast, Solaris shipments totaled 376,000 in 2006 and 371,000 last year.

Where do these people come up with this information? Why did this go down, because we give it away for free so people don't order it anymore. They just download it from the site.

I could go on, but why? Three strikes and your out in my view. Does this make you mad? Do you want your voice heard?

Discredit Paul Krill here and here. Don't let these onesided stories live on...Comment on them!

Just for you DJ:

DJ requested that I put a blurb on how I was able to get redirection working in my vmware+vdi+xpVM solution.

After someone told me how to do it, it was actually quite simple.

1. First, without using vdi, use uttsc and redirect the serial port that you want to windows. For example:

/opt/SUNWuttsc/bin/uttsc -r comport:COM2=$DTDEVROOT/unit/dev/term/a -m -b -t 1800 [ipaddress]

The above command redirects {-r} to COM2 what ever device is on serial {$DTDEVROOT/unit/dev/term/a}. Couple of caveats. The serial port on all sun ray 2's is 9600 baud 8,n,1,off. So if your device attached to the sun ray is say and 19200 baud, it won't work. Test this via command line first and get it working. Once that is done, move on to step 2.

2. So all of the Sun Ray compents are great, because they are shell scripts, so they are easily modified. If we were just using uttsc to a windows term server, we would just put it into the web gui of the Sun Ray interface. No such luck with VDI.

So we have to actually modify the VDI shell script that does all of the "Magic".

1. stop VDA: /opt/SUNWvda/sbin/vda-service stop
2. Backup the VDA script. cp /etc/opt/SUNWkio/sessions/vda/vda /etc/opt/SUNWkio/sessions/vda/vda.bk
3. On line 97 and 99, of the /etc/opt/SUNWkio/sessions/vda/vda script, you will see the lines that start with $theUTTSCScript. Add the "-r comport:COM2=$DTDEVROOT/unit/dev/term/a" to both of the lines, either before or just after the current {-r disk:u=...}
4. Kill all of the VDA/Kiosk Sessions {utrestart -c}, as one's that already exist won't issue this script. Restart the VDA {vda-service stop}
   
5. Insert your card, and botta Bing. Should be good to go.
   

I hope this help DJ.

Great Article on Zombies

Check it out: Here