Solaris 10: laptop config alternative

While I was at Sun, I helped out with several Installfests. For those who aren't familiar with the process, they were a gathering of people with the common goal of getting Solaris loaded on their laptops. Sometimes it was a mixture of luck and magic, to get the target laptop to retain the original OS (if desired) and then partition the disk(s) to load Solaris and/or linux. A fairly typical scenario was a double or even triple boot system;

1 - Windows
2 - Solaris (looked like a linux swap partition)
3 - Linux (Ext partition with root and swap)

The fourth DOS partition would usually be a shared data volume, configured as fat32, so that any OS you chose to boot could mount and access the shared volume.

However, I must be getting lazy, because I didn't want to have to deal with the disk re-partitioning and the risk to my company provided laptop this time around, so here's the alternative, which had some side benefits that I'll get to as I go along.

The first thing I did was download and install vmware Server 1.0.1, which is a freely available at the vmware website. Once the vmware server software is installed* and setup for Solaris, you can load a Solaris 10 x86 CD/DVD media and start installing Solaris as you would on any other hardware. So the first benefit was the time saved by not having to resize my Windows partition and re-partition the disk. You'll just need enough free disk space to hold the guest OS, plus swap space and any other Solaris partitions.
*If you don't already have it, it requires the MS .Net framework 1.1.

During the VM setup I chose to "hide" the VM behind the vmware "nat" and allow vmware to provide the IP address via DHCP. Here's the next benefit, I didn't have to load any special network drivers, the VM connects to the default network that the "master" OS is using at the time, whether that's wired or wireless. Also, sound support worked without any extra packages being loaded.

At this point I could use a little more memory, but I'm getting by pretty well, for my purposes with 1GB of memory. I haven't been able to get USB working, so that I could plug in a memory stick/thumb drive, but that's about the only thing I'm missing at this point. I I can boot the OS to have access to Solaris commands, manpages, do dtrace demos and even setup a Solaris container.

To busy to blog?

That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's kind of like being to busy to catch a cold, it's the good kind of busy, which is way better than the alternative. I've had lots of customer meetings the last few weeks, some are interested in storage solutions, everything from some additional storage (Sun StorageTek 3510 FC) to a solution to replace an optical WORM archiving system (SUN StorageTek 5320 NAS). I've also been busy doing some Total Cost of Ownership studies, these are time consuming, but they're interesting to perform and the benefits can be huge when comparing the costs of older hardware, power consumption and performance and factoring in virtualization, whether it's Solaris Containers or vmware.

On the biking front, my schedule and the shorter days have kept me from riding as much as I would like, but I have been using my trainer (Cyclops fluid2) and some video (that I shot with my miniDV camera mounted on the bike this past summer) as as motivation.

Solaris Virtualization and consolidation

Here's an interesting website that goes into some of the specifics of moving a Solaris 10 zone/container from one hardware platform to another. One area that it didn't mention, but which some customers are already using, is to locate the '/zones' filesystem on a SAN. By doing this, the container becomes highly portable to any platform within the companies infrastructure, that is attached to the SAN. By having the zones on the SAN you don't need to deal with the archiving steps, just detach the container from one platform and attach it to another (oversimplified, but that's the basics).

I'm currently in the middle a design for a Highly Utilized Data Center. I'm not quite sure what to call it, but that name describes the idea behind it. Sometimes when I'm putting a presentation together I feel like I'm scripting a episode of Star Trek with all the technobabble (e.g., business speak) But, to get back on topic, with various forms of virtualization (e.g., vmware and Solaris containers) the trend is to do more with fewer (notice I didn't say less). The idea is of course to have a platform (for the hardware piece I'll use the term platform) that can support many systems and/or services. For the X64 based platform the possibilities range from; vmware to support multiple OSs on a single platform, to Solaris 10 x86 by using zones/containers.

Weekend Rides:
This past weekend marked the start of some near seasonal temperatures (Indian Summer), so I took advantage of it and got out on my bike on both Sat. and Sun., managing about 62 miles total.