A Week’s Training On Solaris System
This week, I attended a 5-day training course on Sun Solaris System. The venue is ExitCertified, which locates at downtown San Jose. The course covers the following topics:
- Solaris Zones: Solaris Zones technology is in the Operating System Virtualization category, which enables software partitioning of a Solaris 10 OS to support multiple virtual independent operating systems with independent process space, allocated resources, and users. In the same category, there are also FreeBSD Jail and Linux-VServer, to name a few. Zones induce a very low overhead on CPU and memory by running non-global zone processes in the same kernel via a kernel dummy process. Currently a maximum of 8191 non-global zones can be created on a single machine.
- Solaris ZFS File System: Sun claims that the ZFS file system is a revolutionary new file system, including features, such as high storage capacity, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, a novel on-disk structure, lightweight instances, and easy storage pool management. My understanding that ZFS is an OS-level software RAID solution, providing data management and protection from the loss of data due to file corruption. Performance wise, it is better than existing journaled file systems and it is compatible with other software raid solutions. There are articles even saying that it outperforms hardware RAID. Apple is rumored to integrate ZFS into its next operation system — OSX 10.5.
- Fault Management Architecture: Fault Management Architecture (FMA) introduces a new software architecture and methodology for fault management across Sun’s product line. The Solaris FMA model provides error handling, fault diagnosing, and response. A response is an event for corresponding agent(s) to take actions, which might include taking a CPU off-line, retiring memory pages, sending information to syslog, or restarting an effected server process.
- The Service Management Facility: The Service Management Facility (SMF) delivers a unified Solaris serice configuration infrastructure capble of accurately modeling any Solaris service and its interaction with Solaris and other servies. SMF starts services in parallel according to dependencies, which allows he system to bot faster, and reduces dependency conflicts.
- DTrace: DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework, which is an observability technology that allows people, for the first time, to answer virtually every question raised about the behavior of the systems and applications. The framework introduces low overhead and its use cannot induce unexpected fatal failure. No wonder Apple has ported it to OSX 10.5.
- Performance Management: This is about the kstat utility that reports OS related performance-relevant data.
- Monitoring Tools: Tools include sar, vmstat, iostat, mpstat, netstat, nfsstat, cpustat, cputrack, proc utilities, such as pargs, and prstat.
- Viewing and Setting Tuning Paramenters: This is talking about tools such as sysdef, mdb, ndd, /etc/system and routeadm.
It is a must-have course for system administrators and/or operation supporters.
