Posted by Marc Fielding on Mar 27, 2012
If you’re planning on running Oracle VM with Amazon EC2, there are some important limitations you should know about.
As part of my work getting the Oracle Linux Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 2 working (yeah that’s a mouthful) I tried using the Oracle-supplied Oracle Linux 6 AMI images that are listed as community AMIs by Amazon:
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Marc Fielding on Mar 27, 2012
As announced a few days ago, Oracle’s core database product is now supported on Oracle Linux 6. Coming a full 13 months after Oracle Linux 6′s launch, and 16 months after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, it’s a much anticipated announcement.
Update 28-Mar-12: the official certification information has come out on My Oracle Support. So far it’s only certified for Oracle Linux 6 Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel version 1, and only for version 11.2.0.3 under Linux x86-64. It also means that a certified combination should be possible using the Oracle-supplied OEL 6 EC2 AMI, though it’s frozen at the original 6.2 release kernel. Unfortunately Oracle 11.2.0.3 is not currently available on OTN but rather requires an active license to download from My Oracle Support.
Oracle’s UEK2 (and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6) add some very interesting features like:
- btrfs, a big break in filesystem organization from traditional ext2/3, with the promise of lightweight copy-on-write snapshot support
- transparent hugepages, dynamically allocating hugepages as needed and performing background memory defragmentation to attempt to free up contiguous space
- transmit packet steering, allowing multiple CPUs to load-balance outgoing network traffic
Although the press release states it’s available “immediately”, I couldn’t find any notes on Oracle’s My Oracle Support support portal relating to the product support; in fact, it still lists Oracle Enterprise 6 as being uncertified as of this writing. So I’m not sure how it will pass the pre-installation operating system checks.
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Edwin Sarmiento on Nov 29, 2010
While I was at the PASS Summit 2010, I’ve spent a fair amount of time at the Ask-the-Experts table on high availability, disaster recovery and virtualization. Conference attendees with different requirements on high availability and disaster recovery come to these tables and ask questions.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time doing high availability and disaster recovery (HADR) in my previous life as a data center engineer focusing on the Microsoft platform. My previous organization sold high availability and disaster recovery solutions to customers like crazy, highlighting the fact that the solutions are more than just the technology aspect. Every time I talk about HADR in my presentations, I focus on the three main ingredients to have a successful implementation – people, process and technology (PPT). Note that technology is at the end of the list as the people and the process components should come first.
What I heard at the PASS Summit gave me insights as to how people approach HADR (and I thought I only saw these on the newsgroups and forums as I answer their questions.) Most SQL Server DBAs (and maybe even a lot of IT professionals) want a technical answer to their HADR problem. They want to know if failover clustering, database mirroring, replication or log shipping is the best solution to their requirement. What’s funny is that when I ask them about what their RPO/RTO/SLAs are, they scratch their head and ask what those acronyms are. And when I start explaining these acronyms to them, they still want to hear what the best solution is for their requirement.
As I prepare for my presentation on Disaster Recovery Techniques for SQL Saturday #61 in Washington DC, I’ll be writing a series of articles about disaster recovery and what RPO/RTO/SLAs are and how they fit into the whole disaster recovery strategies. Before I dive into the “technology” part of the PPT ingredient for a successful HADR implementation, I will talk about the people and the process part first. Why? Because these two will drive the technology part of the whole strategy. And if you’re in the Washington DC area, feel free to drop by at the SQL Saturday event.
Posted by Tim Inkpen on Jun 22, 2010
On June 17th, Pythian hosted the June of meeting of OVSAGE. This month, there was a presentation by Bill Stuart, CEO and VP Engineering , Karoly Molnar of Eseri. Eseri is a local Ottawa company that has integrated a full organization IT solution from the best of the world’s open source, from hosted Intranet to desktops to applications, and host it in the cloud for access on virtual desktops.
Essentially, Eseri provides an “office in a cloud”. Within the organizational cloud, clients have access to a wide range of tools, like wiki, documentation management and e-mail. All of the software used is proven open source products such as Ubuntu for the operating system, Evolution as the e-mail client and Mediawiki for the wiki.
The meeting focused on the technical aspects of Eseri’s offering. Eseri uses Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud as the basis for its architechture. Access is provide using NoMachine client software.
There was much discussion about security, with Eseri emphasizing that each organization is a completely separate entity, with all data being kept with the organizational cloud. Access to the cloud is protected by multiple firewalls. In addition each server/desktop has it’s own firewall enabled.
There was also a great deal of discussion about the tools Eseri applications and how these applications are upgraded. There was much interest in this area since some of the applications that Eseri provides (i.e. Drupal) have complex upgrade paths.
OVSAGE’s next meeting is scheduled for July 17th.
Posted by Brad Hudson, SA Team Lead on May 14, 2010
Good afternoon and welcome to issue 27. The number 27 according to numerology is “the symbol of the divine light” so I’ll try to do that ideal justice. We’re off to a good start, what with me actually getting this out on schedule and such, so let’s get to it while the day is still quiet.
Operating Systems
It’s been two weeks since Ubuntu 10.04 was released. I’m still loving it. If you are on the fence or just curious, Ryan Paul at Ars has an intensive 9 page review of the release. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Brad Hudson, SA Team Lead on May 9, 2010
Hi there and welcome to Blogrotate in which I, your humble host and blogger, bring to you interesting stories and events from the past week in the SysAdmin world. It’s been yet another busy week, which is why this is coming out on a Sunday again, so I am going to have to short list this edition but there’s still plenty of tasty nuggets to be found. Read on.
Operating Systems
It’s been discovered that Microsoft released three patches last month without including them in the release notes. Two of the patches were to fix security holes in MS Exchange servers. While this is nothing new it completely removes the ability for a sysadmin to evaluate the impact of the patches on critical corporate systems, which is necessary before rolling out the updates. Not to mention it makes it really difficult to diagnose a change in behaviour if you have no idea there was a change made. See more gory details in Security firm reveals Microsoft’s ‘silent’ patches.
Sun/Oracle removed public firmware downloads is a strange piece by someone called techbert describing how he logged into the sunsolve to download some firmware for his systems only to find that they were no longer publicly available. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Brad Hudson, SA Team Lead on May 2, 2010
Good evening and welcome to this weeks edition of Blogrotate. It’s a bit later than usual this week due to client concerns but I could not let this week go by without something. This week, after all, is the release of Ubuntu 10.04LTS (Lucid Lynx) so I get to leverage my supreme blogging power to promote the product since I use it pretty much everywhere now.
Operating Systems
So as I was saying, the release of Lucid Lynx has the world abuzz. We had a mini install fest here in the SA cluster at Pythian and 2/3 of it went well. It seems that video is the main source of install pain for us in this new version. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Bill Fraser on Apr 23, 2010
Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. Though I have been contributing to Blogrotate since its inception, this is the first time I have had the honour of posting it myself. Go me!
Operating Systems
Red Hat has announced the availability of a public beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6). There are a number of changes, for which Dave Courbanou at The VAR Guy does a pretty good job of providing an overview. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Brad Hudson, SA Team Lead on Apr 16, 2010
Good morning everyone and welcome to another edition of all the news fit to reprint. Last week iPad news was the number one topic on the hearts and minds of most places I visit, let’s see if the iPad can last another week or if a new champion will be crowned. Call or text your votes to … oh wait that’s someone else. :)
Operating Systems
Starting off on a sad note that I missed last week. Ed Roberts, the inventor of the Altair personal computer died on April 2nd at the age of 68. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Brad Hudson, SA Team Lead on Apr 9, 2010
Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. This week has been absolutely insane so it’ll be another short one I’m afraid. Luckily for me the majority of news outlets were binging on iPad related press which left only limited space for real news.
Mobile
Yes normally I do not cover mobile stuff very much, yet even after the above crack about iPads I feel obligated to at least make mention of it. I, personally, do not care about iPads. Wake me when they have those little scrolly deals from Earth: Final Conflict. For those of you who do care, here’s a quick list of places you could go.
And how is the competition doing? Check out BlackBerry sees iPhone shrink in rear view mirror.
Distro Watch
There was not a lot of news on the OS front this week, but here’s a short list of the few OS coming to a device near you.
Security
There’s a new exploit out against Java which has been proven to have the ability to launch apps on the desktop without authorization. Java exploit launches local Windows applications has the full story.
Here’s the list of what’s in store for the next “Patch Tuesday” release from MS. Microsoft Patch Tuesday for April 2010: 11 bulletins.
Data Centers
Have you ever wondered how a data center protects itself against the damaging effects of an earthquake? Check out Earthquakes and Data Centers over at Data Center Knowledge for an interesting read.
Are you looking for a PCI compliant data center? Check out PCI Compliance: Who Manages What? which gives good insight into the processes and highlights some things you should be looking for when you talk to the sales rep.
Hardware
Were you the first on your block to run out and get an Intel i7? Well now AMD throws even more cores at you. Check out New server platform and 12-core Opteron keep AMD in the game.
The clock tells me it’s time I should be going. I am sure I missed lots of good stuff this week, so feel free to add it to comments. You know you want to.
Stay tuned, the return of tOra is at hand. I’ve successfully compiled tOra on Lucid and have the instructions to prove it.
