Frankfurt OpenSolaris UserGroup (FRAOSUG) gegründet

By , November 19, 2009 16:21

Am Dienstag, dem 17.11.2009 wurde in der Sun Geschäftsstelle in Langen die Frankfurter OpenSolaris UserGroup gegründet. Die 16 Gründungsteilnehmer einigten sich auf zwei wesentliche Punkte:

  • Der Name der OSUG lautet: FRAOSUG
  • Treffen finden immer am 3. Dienstag des Monats statt, der nächste Termin ist also der 15. Dezember

Die Folien mit der Agenda sind hier.

Im Rahmen der Voträge erzählte ich etwas zu HOME-NAS Servern, die man mit OpenSolaris aufbauen kann, und Michael Gottwald ergänzte aus seiner Sicht meinen Beitrag. Die Folien meines Beitrags gibt’s hier.

Volker A. Brandt hielt eine Kurzversion seines Vortrags von der OSDevCon, die Folien finden sich hier.

Und den LiveStream von der ganzen Veranstaltung gibt’s hier.

Es war eine rundum gelungene Veranstaltung, und hat allen viel Spaß gemacht.

Matthias

Rösler und die Gesundheitskarte

By , November 19, 2009 13:53

Unser neuer Gesundheitsminister Dr. Philip Rösler hat gestern in einer Pressemitteilung einen interessanten Satz zur geplanten Gesundheitskarte von sich gegeben:

Wir gehen den Aufbau der Telematikinfrastruktur schrittweise an und beginnen mit einer erweiterten und datenschutzrechtlich sichereren Krankenversichertenkarte. Die Realisierung weiterer medizinischer Anwendungen wird so lange mit einem unbefristeten Moratorium belegt, bis praxistaugliche, höchsten datenschutzrechtlichen Anforderungen entsprechende Lösungen vorgelegt werden.

Bin mal gespannt, wie das aussehen wird! Und was die Piratenpartei davon halten und dazu sagen wird.

Matthias

Sun’s VDI in discussion

By , November 12, 2009 19:33

Brian Madden and Claudio Rodrigues and others do discuss about Sun’s VDI.

I left the following comment on CR’s blog, as I am unable to get a login at brianmadden.com, the email with the initial PW does simply not reach me…

Taking the overall loss of Sun as an indicator for the fittedness of a specific product for a given problem, is simple bullshit… ;-) And is only trying to discredit something for something else… What’s it, you are jealous of in Sun’s VDI solution?

OK, with that of my mind ( ;-) ), let’s state:

Sadly, Sun’s annual report does not specify numbers neither for VDI nor Desktops nor Sun Rays.

But, now, back to the question at hand:

There’s more to be checked, if comparing VDI solutions, then only the underlying OS for a small, although important part of the overall solution/offering.

Some of these additional topics include:

1.) Costs of acquisition (what does ist cost to build an environment, HW and SW and installtime)
2.) Operating expenses (and yes, there you have costs for admins, if you need a “new” OS platform)
3.) Security (overall, starting from separation of users to separation of processes to security against intruders on the overall chain of devices and software stacks)
4.) Efficiency (where do I get most power for the buck)
5.) Access point in case of problem (one point shopping, one point service?)

I’m sure you read about: http://www.projectvrc.com/. Sadly, that did not include Sun’s VDI. Still, there is something to learn here. The differences between the different solutions (TS, or Xen, or, …) are not the decision making points, as the differences are not as big. A main finding there is, that memory per server is a limiting factor. That’s why for example, in former times, the Sun X4600 M2 was a very attractive system for large VDI environments. And, as further answer to 4.) above, Sun’s VDI allows you to run either VBox or VMware as a basis for user sessions, which also influences points 1.) and 2.)

For point 5.) only MS and Sun can offer a “two stop shopping” VDI solution, MS by adding a single HW supplier, and Sun by adding MS licenses. All other VDI vendors need a three stop offer, as VMware does not own MS licenses nor Hardware, and as Citrix also does not own HW nor MS licenses. That is a point, that’s not to be underestimated! And here Sun’s the only one who can offer two stop shopping for HETEROGENEOUS environments.

Now, let’s look at point 3.), security.

We all know, that Solaris is the most advanced and efficient (scaling nearly linearly with addition of CPUs way beyond 100 CPUs) OS on the planet. This helps immensely, when defining large scale environments, because consolidating onto large systems gets possible, because the OS is not simply managing itself and the underlying resources, but leaves many resources available for the apps. With putting for example every single VBox instance into a separate Solaris 10 Zone/Container, you additionally get the benefit of fine grained resource control AND security, as that environment simply is not able to break into a different Zone/Container. And Zones/Container are EAL4+ certified… ;-) (afaik).

And, an additional topic for 4.) is putting the VDI images onto ZFS. Cloning gets easy and quick… But that’s another topic…

So, I would love to see projectvrc results for Sun’s VDI… And a more vivid discussion about the pros and cons of VDI solutions in total…

Matthias

Lecture again…

By , November 5, 2009 13:13

Also during the winter semester, Ulrich Gräf und myself will be giving a lecture at the University in Darmstadt. This time it’s about

Persistant Storage – Datastructures and Algorithms

The plan, which still can change due to unforseen events, is:

16.10.09: L1: Intro and sequential Datasets
  Notation of Information (writing)
	Drawings
	Writing (Coal, Color, Clay-slate (or what's the word for "Tontafel"), Knots, Papyrus, Printing)
	
  Data-Handling (Reading and Writing)
	punchband
	punchcard
	tape
	disk (magnetical, optical, MO)
	Flash

  Dataset
	Structure
		Datasets/Extents
		Types: F, V, FB/VB, FBS/VBS
		Setoriented treatment
	Algorithms
		FCB
			Extents
			Position
		open/close
		read/write
		Buffering through Application
	Catalog
	PDS
	Consistency

23.10.09: L2: Indices
	B-Tree, B*-Tree
	Bitmap-Tables
	Index-Datasets
	Performance-Aspects
	Space-Aspects
	Consistency

30.10.09: L3: FAT (Matthias Pfützner)

06.11.09: L4: Encodings (Matthias Pfützner)
	EBCDIC
	ASCII 6, 7, 8 Bit
	UTF Variants

13.11.09: L5: Simple Databases
	MySQL Tables
		(InnoDB)
	Indices
	Consistency

20.11.09: L6: Datastructures for Databases
	Shared Memory
	Multi-Process vs. Multi-Thread
	Source?
	
27.11.09: L7: Hash-Methods
	Principle
	Overflow
	Perfect Hash
	Minimum Perfect Hash
	Sparse Hash

04.12.09: L8: DBM
	Structure
	File holes - Problems?
	
	VSAM, etc.
		sequential
		ISAM
		hash
		index

11.12.09: L9: UFS Structure
	as Berkeley FFS, NTFS
	ext2, ext3,  VxFS Differences

18.12.09: L10: Recovery and Consistency (Matthias Pfützner)
	File System Check
	Table Consistency Check
	Backup / Restore

	Log
	COW
	Snapshot
	Checksums
	Self Healing

15.01.10: L11: UFS in the OS
	Datastructures
	Memory Walk
	
22.01.10: L12: ZFS
	Features
	Datastructures
	
29.01.10: L13: ZFS in the OS
	Datastructures
	ZIL
	ARC Cache
	L2ARC
	Memory Walk
	
05.02.10: L14: Oracle
	Features
	Log
	Redo-Log
	Transactions
	Read Transaction

12.02.10: L15: Wrapup	

Hope to see many enthusiastic students…

Matthias

Update (30. November 2009): Slides are available at: http://www.dvs.tu-darmstadt.de/teaching/storage/2009/

Cleanup of blog done…

By , November 2, 2009 19:55

So, now, after approx. 2 hours in total, the move to the new home is done. What kept me busy was the fact, that wordpress or the newer firefox seem to make a difference between lower-case and upper-case characters in html coding… so a <br> is something different then a <BR>. That’s not standard, but, it is, what it is…

Matthias

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