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Linux & UNIX based virtualization has always been far superior to that of Windows. Superior is probably an understatement though, more like exponentially better.

Just check into

OpenVZ http://openvz.org/
FreeBSD Jails http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_Jail
Solaris zones http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zones/faq/
Xen http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/

and the list goes on. So much better on *nix. Of course, I think that is somehow related to the fact you can run a *nix box via CLI, bare minimum of functionality, the likes of which it even the best Windows gurus cannot get close to (though Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell do rox)

What is funny, is so many of us are ignorant of virtualization's roots in IBM mainframes. Big Blue was so far ahead of the times, it is like omg. BTW, I love Wikipedia. I've been preparing a presentation on virtualization the last few days, and Wikipedia makes it so easy!

OpenSolaris iSCSI target support is underway.

Sun is indeed currently working on a iSCSI Target (and possibly FCP target as well) server.

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/iscsitgt/

This fits nicely with Sun's new ZFS file system.

ZFS blurs the traditional boundaries between volume management, RAID and file systems. All disks are added into one big pool that can be carved out into either the native ZFS filesystem format or virtual volumes that can be formatted as other filesystem formats. It has many other interesting features like instantaneous snapshots and copy-on-write clones.

Check out ZFS-- http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs

It makes managing this sort of storage box a snap, and allows you to dial up or down the level of redundancy by using either mirroring (2-way, 3-way, or more) or RAIDZ. And soon, RAIDZ2.

Additionally, Solaris running on the machine has fault managment support for the drives, and can work with the SMART data to predict drive failures, and exposes the drives to inspection via IPMI and other management interfaces. Fault LEDs light when drives experience failures, making them a snap to find and replace.

>I'm convinced that Sun really doesn't get open source or how it works. Solaris is a perfect example of this.

How so? Even Richard Stallman called OpenSolaris 'Free'.[1] It's not "gnu compatible" but that's the fault of the GPL more than anything else. The FreeBSD people don't seem to be having any licensing problems using DTrace.

So, again I ask; how is Solaris a "perfect example" that "Sun really doesn't get open source"?

[1]
"The current license of Solaris is a free software license, which means
it is basically ethical. But it would be a more useful contribution
to the free software commnuity if it had a GPL-compatible license, and
I wish Sun would make that change."
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?messa geID=7785#7785
(emphasis mine)

what is stopping Linux and the Open Source community from doing it? Oh, that's right- it's easier to just complain about MS than to actually get your hands dirty. Nevermind then, carry on.

• Pooled Storage Model
• Always consistent on disk
• Protection from data corruption
• Live data scrubbing
• Instantaneous snapshots and clones
• Fast native backup and restore
• Highly scalable
• Built in compression
• Simplified administration model

what is stopping Linux and the Open Source community from doing it? Oh, that's right- it's easier to just complain about MS than to actually get your hands dirty. Nevermind then, carry on.

• Pooled Storage Model
• Always consistent on disk
• Protection from data corruption
• Live data scrubbing
• Instantaneous snapshots and clones
• Fast native backup and restore
• Highly scalable
• Built in compression
• Simplified administration model

Try this: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/ Not available on Linux "yet", but it was only announced last week.

Did you look at http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/ and then follow the ON link to the page that explains in detail how to obtain either source and build, or obtain Sun's distro of OpenSolaris, Solaris Express Community Release?

If you're already running SAN over FC, then seriously look at SUN Solaris with ZFS. It would save you tons of headaches over RAID5 (write holes, bad data on disk... etc).

Go through their docs on ZFS at http://www.opensolaris.org/ if your data is important to you.

For now the Sun distribution of OpenSolaris installs on top of regular Sun development builds of Solaris called "Solaris Express: Community Release".

The download pages for OpenSolaris have links to CD and DVD images of the current Solaris Express builds.

Did you request a sponsor by sending email to request-sponsor@opensolaris.org?

I checked out the mail archive at
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/forum.jspa?forumID =27
and could not see your request come in.

I'm sorry that you've given up trying - if you actually talk to the folks on
freenode's #opensolaris channel or the opensolaris-code@opensolaris.org, you'll
find a lot of folks willing to help.

http://opensolaris.org/os/community/tools/scm/

bottom left hand side are links to the evaluations

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/opengrok/ is the best that I've used till now. Easy to setup and quite fast to use.

the opensolaris code browser is built off a bunch of open source stuff.

OpenGrok
its incredibly easy to use, and makes things very easy to read. and is now packaged for your enjoyment.
and available at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/opengrok/

Meanwhile, competitor Microsoft is making room for 12,000 new employees.

Hmm...

OK. Up front:

<disclaimer>
I work at Sun. I do not speak for Sun in any way, however. None of what I'm saying is priviledged, or otherwise not publicly available.
</disclaimer>

A lot of what is right for you depends on your exact setup. Given your description, I'm assuming you are primarily concerned with file serving for clients, with the possibility of needing to centralize some primary storage for DB or similar app-specific servers. I'm also going to assume you are single-site (given the relatively small amount of storage, I think that's fair).

10TB is not much space (really). I'm going to assume the solution should scale to 3x that over its lifespan (3-5 years). That is, you should have the ability to add up to 20TB or so more rather simply, and without buying major upgrades.

NAS is the cheap way to go, but I'd recommend against it for now: it's rather hard to find one that supports DFS, and OpenAFS isn't well supported either in the NAS space. I'd also shy away from a true SAN solution, since they're going to be way over-engineered for your rather modest needs. By "true" SAN, I'm talking about a large controller head (usually a modified and upgraded FiberChannel switch mated with a small management controller) which front-ends a large number of disk arrays. Rather, I'd recommend a clustered FC solution.

For your problem, I'd look at 2-3 machines which would be your primary file server cluster. They should be hot-clustered together (using your favorite cluster software). I'm going to suggest you use FibreChannel as the back-end direct-attach-storage technology. Connect the head machines to redundant FC switches (you don't need anything really fancy here), and then use JBODs or HW arrays as your storage devices.

Here's a sample solution from Sun (which, if you look at is, is going to be very competative with anyone, including Dell and Build-it-yourself stuff):

• (3) Sun x4200 w/ 8GB RAM & 2 dual Opteron 275
• (6 total): two single-port 2gbps FC host adapters per server
• two 8-port low-end FC switches
• (1) 3510FC array w/ redundant HW Raid contollers & 12 x 146GB 10k FC disks
• (1) 3511FC JBOD w/ redundant FC connections & 5 x 500GB 7.2k SATA disks
• Solaris 10 Update 2 with ZFS (coming Summer 2006)
• OpenAFS for Solaris
• Samba on Solaris
• SunCluster software
• Possibly use Zones (i.e. Solaris' VM setup) for better server partitioning
• 3-year SunSpectrum Gold support (24x7x365 telephone support, 8-8 onsite hardware replacment, 4-hour response time for hardware)

ZFS is the bee's knees. It's just so great. Check it out here: ZFS on OpenSolaris. It's currently available only in the preview Solaris 11 (codename: Nevada), but it will be included in Solaris 10 Update 2 as production-quality code. S10u2 should be available sometime this summer.

I run a similar setup here at work, plus at my private ISP company. The above config is fully supported (all software stacks, hardware, and interaction) by Sun, so you've got 1-stop maintanence support. The above config is for 4.2TB (raw). Assume you RAID-5 the SATA drives, and RAID-10 (striped mirrors) the FC drives, that's 2.9TB usable. Adding additional FC JBODs (either FC or SATA drives) is relatively cheap, and VERY simply to configure.

The solution above is very flexible, and will allow you to add disk and servers to the mix easily and (relatively) cheaply. It is also quite good performance. It does NOT support iSCSI directly to the JBODs or FC switches - you can get an iSCSI HBA for the X4200s should you want to. the 3510FC has built-in administration, so you could attach additional app/DB servers directly to the FC switch for better performance, while still maintaining good overall maintenance/configuration control. The really nice thing about the above hardware config is that it will run Solaris, RedHat or SLES

There was a release of Solaris 2.5.1 for PowerPC that was discontinued around the middle of 1996 (I think). Just like Apple, it's not unthinkable that Sun keeps a version ported to a few select architectures like the PowerPC

Or maybe they're just letting the Polaris project (re-)do it for them. (Note that, unlike the original PPC port, the new one is big-endian.)

I mean, raise your hand if you believe Sun's offer to "open source" Java will actually become a code dump under an OSI approved license.

See here for a credible precedent.

In a way Linux as a whole (the kernel) is now suffering from the same problems as Debian stable once was, at least from my perspective. Do you guys remember the previous Debian stable? It remained stable for such a long time that eventually you simply needed websites like Backports to be able and run some current software since everything included with Debian was way ancient. Naturally you could run Unstable but it wasn't exactly the best approach for servers. I eventually ended up running Testing and keeping a close eye open for bug reports, exploits, etc. while not updating the box every time something new came out.

And that is what I see happening here as well. The last really stable kernel is IMO 2.4.32. There are no new features being added, only bugs being fixed. Which is IMO exactly what is needed for serious usage since every beginner programmer knows that when you add new features to your software you will also increase the risk of more bugs popping up. These could be bugs resulting in the addition of new code and the way it cooperates with the existing code, or simply bugs which only manifistate themselves in the new routines. Unfortunatly the kernel developers don't see this or they don't care resulting in a rather stable kernel 2.4.32 which unfortunatly lacks some hardware support and certain features when compared with the rather unstable 2.6.x kernel branch.

Personally I'm worried about the future. When looking at the 2.6.x kernel I don't like what I see. When looking at the current Debian Sid and the rather rough way they implemented the new X environment I also can't help wonder if there aren't more bugs than "usual" popping up. /usr/X11R6, so why couldn't they add /usr/X11R7 ?

Anyway, this is all moot now since I have lost fait in Linux all together when it comes to server usage for quite some time. I think that Linux is suffering from its own success and it may well proof fatal in the end, although I really hope it doesn't. I still enjoy running Linux on my workstation and I'm not planning to stop. But when it comes to serious work, like my server, my trust is now put into Sun Solaris 10. While Solaris is also moving into the Open Source environment Sun still uses their common sense and as such split their software into 3 parts: Open Source, Unstable and Stable.

The problem, exactly, is that SUN only implements its JDK on the platforms it judges as "interesting enough". Running a non-mainstream OS on some non-i386 hardware will always end up with you unable to run any SUN JDK -> simply doesn't exist. Well, Blackdown can help and hacking and going all sort of self-punishment you might end up in getting it to work, but well, compare the number of platforms GCC or Perl run on, and compare the number of platforms supported by SUN JAVA, and well, you'll see that SUN JAVA's portability is purely theorical. Now the usual answer "but nobody does this!". Some vendors, and SUN is no exception, are very smart at knowing what people want, without even asking them. Should you want to do something they didn't plan, you cease to exist.

Now it's perfectly true people have the specs, people are free to implement. Look at the efforts made by GCJ and Classpath and you'll see that even with many talented developpers involved, it's hard to catch up with SUN.

What could SUN benefit? Obviously, get many free software developpers to get interested in Java at all. Many software developped in C++ could have gone the Java way, if there had been a way to run Java programs freely, using the *latest* JDK. For now, people have to beg SUN (and possibly IBM) to port the JDK to this or that platform to get a chance to run their Java 1.5 program on *any* platform. Not to mention the fact that some people care about freedom and the right to know what they are running on their computers...

IMHO, SUN will publish Java under a Free (as in freedom) and/or Open Source licence the day the concurrent implementations (GCJ,Kaffe,Classpath...) will catch up. On that day SUN's JVM will have absolutely no added value but the stamp "this is SUN software" (which is what counts more for many). Think of Motif, it got free the day GTK and Qt/KDE where ahead of it. Same for OpenSolaris which comes at a time the Linux kernel is pretty advanced in term of features and is obviously (even if not technically fully equivalent) taking significant market shares so that, well, Solaris is dead.

Sun will "Open Source" Java the day it's dead, because another "Open Source" project took the lead. So if SUN ever publishes a free software JDK, you could interpret this as a signal that means something like "GCJ+Classpath is ready for production use".

Apart from those pluses mentioned by lokedhs (snapshotting is no trivial feature to have, if you're running databases, for example, or want admin abilities like rollback) - What ZFS offers that no other Linux filesystem offers, let alone HFS+, is end-to-end data integrity and self-healing. That's why I picked Solaris 10 for a high-integrity database app recently. Nobody else could offer the integrity guarantees (apart from some SAN vendors perhaps).

Thanks to this, a lot of interesting stuff becomes possible, such as the fast file system creation which is demonstrated in this very cool demo.

If you don't consider ZFS a quantum leap in file system technology, I wonder what it would take for you to use that expression (set aside for the moment the people who argue that "wuantum leap" should in fact mean the opposite :-) ).

Even so, all of the other features of ZFS are worth much more than this. If Apple is anything more than a consumer widget company now, ZFS should definitely be under consideration.

ZFS is far from "just another filesystem," and comparing it to existing filesystems indicates a lack of understanding. Take a look at this presentation for more information.

so do it.

Try here if you want an idea .. my complaint was that the entire site was very linux centric .. there's some pretty good ideas going into Solaris and with their big push in amd64 and i386, it can be a more affordable and stable platform to work with .. in fact if you want you can reference the Infiniband source here or here for example ..

Try here if you want an idea .. my complaint was that the entire site was very linux centric .. there's some pretty good ideas going into Solaris and with their big push in amd64 and i386, it can be a more affordable and stable platform to work with .. in fact if you want you can reference the Infiniband source here or here for example ..

Try here if you want an idea .. my complaint was that the entire site was very linux centric .. there's some pretty good ideas going into Solaris and with their big push in amd64 and i386, it can be a more affordable and stable platform to work with .. in fact if you want you can reference the Infiniband source here or here for example ..

Xen for OpenSolaris was released back in February.

What? Then I have an even better "application" to try out -- it's called OpenSolaris, and it just booted fresh on an intel Mac:

http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?messa geID=32019#32019

Perhaps because Sun already has successful Open source and free projects and standards with huge followings.

It's almost unheard of to find a large mature codebase which is particularly clean.

Hard, but not impossible. Going on 14 years and still pretty much compatible in the userspace ABI.

X11 is another one where things pretty much still work at the protocol/API level (though I'm not sure how clean the code is).

mplayer is available for download at Blastwave and you could try asking for mencode.
Check SunFreeware for precompiled packages as well.

If you want to build things yourself, Solaris 10 and the Sun compilers are free for download and use. gcc is also included with the OS but is slower.

You can find OS source code at OpenSolaris.

There's also a project to port Xen to OpenSolaris.

Its BGP daemon is BY FAR better than ... quagga

I'd strongly dispute that. Obviously the OpenBGPd think so - I'd love to read a comparison from somone other than an OpenBSD developer though.

SIXXS "Ghost Route Hunter" and RIPEs' RIS both use Quagga btw.

Sun's new filesystem ZFS doesn't need RAID.

I'd go with OpenGrok if you have the resources. It's very fast and very powerful.

Solaris is free, and you can run MySQL/PostgreSQL on top with no problem. I just wanted to clarify that you could have left the Solaris->Linux swap out of your equation, because that doesn't have anything to do with cost.

Bravo to author Andy Bakun for writing this article about F/OSS (UNIX/Linux) technologies without implying that the article is targeted for any particular open-source OS. In other words, it's equally relevant on all of the open-source OS's -- the BSDs, the OpenSolaris based distros and the Linuxes.

Eric Boutilier -- OpenSolaris

Have you looked at ZFS from Sun?

I believe at this moment it's only available on Solaris, but it's open source.

Personally I haven't had the chance to try it myself, but from what I read it seems really impressive, at least on paper. Might want to check it out.

Besides, Linux is slowing down as the features required for scalability are added. :-)

Link to libmicro. Builds on at least Solaris and SuSE using gcc or the now-free Sun compilers.

Don't imagine it. Just do it.... http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/brandz/

While I whole-heartedly agree with you on several of your points (especially FreeBSD's short straw) I see GPL Java going the way of w3.org HTML specifications and Microsoft's HTML "standard". One effective & correct way of doing things, but a more widely distributed audience of crap that makes the entire idea quite muddy and less effective.

Another large potential reason for keeping Java guarded is that it may really screw up Sun's enterprise stack if allowed to be GPL'd. Although I am in no way affiliated with Sun, I would suspect that this would be of a much larger concern than opening up Java alone. However, I can see a OpenJava site similar to OpenSolaris with a source code browser and using a similarly restricted CDDL license with the potential for adopting the new GPL3. Such a collaborative site could serve as the testing code and a base for future production quality code similar to the current Solaris model. This would enable quality back-ports (yay FreeBSD!) and seem to serve all needs I can think of, besides pure GPL2 zealots.

BTW, nice site Raven, I've visited frequently.

... by the community, see

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/power_pc/
http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh011606-story02.html
http://www.blastware.org/

Guys, get yourself a little more current. OpenSolaris is actively being ported to PowerPC. Thanks to opening the source so many things that were promised in the past finally become true.

The next closest thing would indeed be Linux.

FreeBSD? Eh, no, FreeBSD is rather incompatible with UNIX. Try ignoring SIGCHLD (actually SIGCLD); a real UNIX will automatically reap any dead children so you don't get zombies. Try a basic UNIX command like "ps -ef". Look at signal() behavior. Look at the commands used to control printing.

ZFS offers a more secure storage medium than RAID, no matter if you use SATA or SCSI. Here's an article on RAID-Z and the advantages of this system.

Here's an even more direct comparison: http://opensolaris.org/os/community/brandz/

This lets you run multiple Linux instances on top of Solaris.

In the same spirit, another alternative is to use OpenSolaris's ZFS/Raid-Z, which is a free, software-raid5-like implementation. Unlike other software RAID5 implementations, it's easy to set up and administer (you don't need a PhD in LVM/RAID management).

It's also wonderful in that it has automatic error-correction AND disk scrubbing. One of the Solaris developers is actually using it with flaky hardware (bad/insufficient power supply), and ZFS/Raid-Z automatically detects the error and corrects it. Note that this is different from the ECC done by the disk drive. Basically, the data on the platter is "correct" (passes ECC and doesn't get flagged as a bad sector), but the data on the platter is not what the OS originally wrote (the data probably got corrupted on the way to the platter due to the flaky hardware).

Now, other software raid implementions can do the same thing, but I don't know of any with the same seemingly mindless ease of setup and maintenance. You should check out the demo video, "100 mirrored filesystems in 5 minutes". Also check out the self healing demo video.