Solaris 10: tips and tricks for system administration

I would like to thank all the readers of this blog and to wish you happy holidays!

I won't be posting until January, so I'll see you next year!

I've just read at Ilya Voronin's blog (blog.curthread.org), that for all the Sun Cluster fans, today is definitely a lucky day, because the new version of Sun Cluster - 3.2 - is already available for download.

By the way, looks like from this version on the clustering solution from Sun is called Solaris Cluster, and includes the following components:
- Sun Cluster
- Sun Cluster Geographic Edition
- Sun Cluster Agents

To my shame and regret, I haven't got a chance to acquire any useful experience with Sun Cluster. In my company I'm working with Veritas Cluster Server, because it's a historical thing. But I have some theoretical knowledge of Sun Cluster, and would really like to give it a try some day.

Anyway. Here are just some of the Sun Cluster 3.2 features:

New command line interface
In new Sun Cluster version, you have separate commands for each type of cluster object, and all of them try to have similar names for command line options where possible. Alsom, both short and long names for each option are supported.

SMF support
Sun Cluster is now tightly integrated with SMF, and easily supports controlling SMF-managed services as Sun Cluster resources.

Sun Cluster Quorum Server
For any scenarios requiring quorum, you no longer have to use shared storage. Sun Cluster supports using a separate Solaris server running quorum-server module. All the atomic reservations will be done over TCP/IP.

Such an approach allows you to reduce the time needed for failing over from one cluster node to another.

Extended Solaris Zones support
Sun Cluster supports now a plethora of services running within non-global zones.

ZFS support
Starting from this Sun Cluster version, ZFS is fully supported as a local highly available filesystem (HA FS).

Multi-Terabyte Disk and EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) labels
A quite traditional update for many other packages - full support of disks with capacity over 1Tb and new EFI disk labels.

Better support of Veritas products
In particular, components of Veritas Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0 for SPARC are supported, as well as VxVM 4.1 for x86/x64 (in case you didn't know, Veritas products of these versions are already Solaris 10 aware).

Live Upgrade
Now you can use Live Upgrade to update your OS with Sun Cluster on top ot if. From documentation I can see that Live Upgrade supports SVM only at the moment, not VxVM.

Command Logging
You can have all the cluster management commands logged now - this is good for both diagnostics and for reproduction of your cluster environment in a new configuration.

You can download Sun Cluster 3.2 here: Sun Cluster 3.2 download.

Also, you might like reading a Sun Cluster blog - Sun Cluster Oasis. And, as always. for more information you can consult the Sun Cluster section of docs.sun.com: Sun Cluster 3.2 Documentation.

I've just learned through Lifehacker about a great page: The Linux Equivalent Project. Actually, it's a pretty impressive index of free open-source software, which will work on Solaris, Linux, or any other UNIX OS.

What I really like about this list is that you're given names of software products Windows, and they a few of open-source equivalents. Very useful, especially for all the beginners who are just switching to Solaris.

If you miss some particular software in Solaris world, please have a look: LinuxEq.com

Finally, the next update of Solaris 10 is out, with plenty of interesting and useful features.

I personally am most excited about ZFS improvements - somehow OpenSolaris isn't always welcome in big companies, and so it is very important that so many crucial improvements have finally made their way into an official update to Solaris 10:

- zfs recursive snapshots
- Double Parity RAID-Z - raidz2
- Extended error handling and notification for ZFS - with newly supplied ZFS diagnostic engine, you can now get errors handled and reported for pools and specific devices, CRC and I/O errors, and get it all printed to your console and/or /var/adm/messages. You can also get detailed information on fixing your ZFS problem using zpool status command.

As always, you can download Solaris 10 from here: Get the Solaris 10 Operating System.

If you want more details, please have a look at the great summary post by Ben Rockwood (Cuddletech) and, for all the details, a What's New in the Solaris 10 11/06 Release document ondocs.sun.com.