Learning Solaris 10 Check out the Zones F.A.Q. !

A huge step-by-step Bigadmin article on how to install Sun Cluster 3.2 + Oracle RAC

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A must-read book for anything RAC-related.

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Sun Cluster 3.1 8/05 Software has been released during last quarterly Sun Network Computing event.
Solaris 10 related new features include :

# Solaris 10 OS support
# Solaris[tm] Container coexistence for maximum benefit from server consolidation
# Solaris OS on x64 support, enabling use of AMD Opteron servers
# HA Agent for Solaris Containers

A description of the cluster-aware Zones ( aka ‘Container’ ) new feature can be found here.

Go to this article for a short list of all the new features or directly have a look at the Release Notes for the full description.

To have a look at the what’s next ( not official ! ), read this.

Another version of SunCluster has also been announced during the event : Sun Cluster Geographic Edition. Basically enables multiple geographically dispersed sites.

T : cluster, zones

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I have had the opportunity to test the next release of Sun Cluster, the one that will support Solaris 10 zones. It looks rather impressive to my opinion…

1. What do you need ?
At least 2 machines + some shared storage + Sun Cluster software + the new “zones” Sun Cluster data agents

2. What’s the main idea ?
The main idea is to make it as transparent as possible that you are running your application in a Cluster inside a Zone. The way it is achieved is by letting Sun Cluster software run in the Global zones and perform its traditional job of global devices management, volume management, private interconnect management,… The actual to-be-clustered application is installed inside a Zone whose entire directory tree ( zonepath variable ) resides on the shared storage. This Zone is going to be started by one node at a time. New fault monitors will need to detect zone’s failures and instruct the Sun Cluster framework either to restart the zone or to failover the zone to the other node.

3. What is this zone agent ?
Up to now, testing the sanity of the application was done by means of specialized Sun-provided Sun Cluster Data Agent which were providing the glue between the application and the Sun Cluster framework. The Sun Cluster software also checks the sanity of both nodes. Since now the application is running in a Zone, we also need to monitor the Zone and take action at the Zone level instead of the node level. For instance, failing over to the other node involves stopping the zone on the first node, deporting/importing device group & starting the zone on the other node.
The other job of the zone agent is to monitor the application itself.

4. The zone boot component
The component will be registered and added to a Sun Cluster ressource group to take care of the monitoring of the zone. It will perform some sanity checks to make sure that the zone is doing fine. If something is wrong with the zone or if instructed to do so by Sun Cluster, it will organize the shutdown, restart or failover of the zone.

5. Application Monitoring in the zone
Two components can be used (registered and added to a Sun Cluster ressource group) to monitor the application. The first one is very simple, we only have to mention the scripts that will be used to start/stop/monitor the application.
The second one implements the integration with SMF, the Service Management Facility. SMF is capable of stopping, starting and monitoring an application ( called a Service ). So we can benefit from the additional features of SMF just by telling the cluster which FMRI ( Fault Managed Ressource Identifier ) it needs to supervise. When onlining the ressource, the component will start the service using the SMF framework.

6. IP address
Unique IP Address : where in the past, Sun Cluster had to manage the failover of the application IP address between the two nodes by using a ressource of type “Logical Hostname”, this is now opotional. If the configuration of the zone is identical on both nodes ( very easy to accomplish ) then the “active” node will boot the zone with the one unique zone IP. This is possible because the zone Iwill ony be started by one node at a time.

7. Conclusion
Strong points :

• Easier installation / management : many applications have to be installed on each node of a typical cluster. Because zones provide a application environment that doesn’t depend on the underlying physical infrastructure, the application now just has to be installed on the Zone that will happily be booted by each node. Bringing an application to Sun Cluster is now much easier.
• Taking advantage of the better security & ressource flexibility provided by the Zone feature.
• Taking advantage of the added security provided by the SMF feature. This supposes that your application has already been converted to a SMF service. Lots of them are/will be available by the time companies start to evaluate the product.

T : Zones

Sun Cluster Geographic Edition : the name choosen by Sun for their world-wide clustering solution. One node in America, another one in Asia, a third one in Europe. Some problems to solve : data access by multiple nodes ( obtained through Storage Array Data Replication ), new types of private interconnect ( latency ! ), remote control, …

Announced features of the first release: ( probably this year )

• Disaster failover support
• Switchover support
• Complete, secure, remote Lights Out operational control
• No distance restrictions
• Data Replication :
  • Sun Storedge Availability Suite
  • Hitachi Truecopy
• Solaris 8, Solaris 9 (SPARC only)

Announced features of the second release:

• Support of Solaris 10
• Support of Solaris on x86
• Data Replication :
  • EMC SRDF
  • Oracle Dataguard
• Site aware agents

Relevant Links :

Sun StorEdge Availability Suite : Sun Soft’s solution to data repliation
Hitachi TrueCopy Remote Replication Overview ( pdf )
EMC Remote replication : SRDF
Database disaster recovery using standby DB : Oracle Data Guard

Could attend a presentation of the Sun Cluster team and the features that are coming soon. Lot of people were there because everyone wants to know if / when / how Sun Cluster will take advantage of the new S10 features. No timeframe officially given for each release. Educated guess sometimes available

Besides the two next updates of SC3.1 and the future of Sun Cluster ( 3.2 ? ), note the appearance of a new product : Sun Cluster Geographic Edition.

Disclaimer : absolutely no commitment from Sun about the exact feature set and the timing at which the individual features will be released !

Sun Cluster 3.1 U4 ( Around september… )

• Support of Solaris 10
• Support of Oracle RAC on NAS storage from Network Appliance
• 8 nodes for Oracle RAC
• Support of Infiniband
• Live Upgrade
• Shared Interconnect with VLAN
• New data services : NFSv4, Siebel 7.7, Sybase 12.5, Oracle RAC on S10 for x86

Sun Cluster 3.1 U5

• Red Hat Linux support
• AMD64 support
• SMF integration
• ZFS as a failover FS
• EFI disk label support
• SNMP event MIB
• New data services : Some Linux agents

Future of Sun Cluster ( possibilities rather than facts )

• Service Level Mgt - Workload monitoring
• More S10 integration : local zones, SMF for data services
• Simplified command interface. Wizards.
• 16-node Oracle RAC

Long term objective : Full integration with other Cluster products, including Geographic edition and N1 provisioning products.

Relevant Links :
More info on Infiniband
Benefits of RAC on Sun Cluster

Sun Cluster Geographic Edition