Migrating zones between sun4u and sun4v systems

Migrating zones between sun4u and sun4v systems
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I've recently started off with my new project which is a mixture of UFS --> ZFS migration, Zones/Containers migration from one host to another & patching. The real challenge is I've to do it with minimum downtime & have to be "real fast & accurate" at execution.

As I've already started with this project so before jump into project I done some detail study on few subjects related to this project so thought of publishing my findings on my blog.

The first question came in my mind is - If the zone is residing on V890 i.e sun4u arch & I've to move it to SPARC-Enterprise-T5120 i.e. sun4v arch then is it supported & if yes then how it can be done? Below paragraph talks about it.

A recent (not that recent) RFE to make attach work across sun4u and sun4v - 6576592 RFE: zoneadm detach/attach should work between sun4u and sun4v architecture.
Starting with the Solaris 10 10/08 release, zoneadm attach with the -u option also enables migration between machine classes, such as from sun4u to sun4v.

Note for Solaris 10 10/08: If the new host has later versions of the zone-dependent packages and their associated patches, using zoneadm attach with the -u option updates those packages within the zone to match the new host. The update on attach software looks at the zone that is being migrated and determines which packages must be updated to match the new host. Only those packages are updated. The rest of the packages, and their associated patches, can vary from zone to zone.

This option also enables automatic migration between machine classes,such as from sun4u to sun4v.

Okay now when I'm all clear with this doubt so let's move ahead with looking at how to do the migration & what all steps are involved to do so.

Overview -


Migrating a zone from one system to another involves the following steps:

1. Detaching the Zone. This leaves the zone on the originating system in the "configured" state. Behind the scenes, the system will generate a "manifest" of the information needed to validate that the zone can be successfully attached to a new host machine.

2. Data Migration or if your zones are on SAN then re-zone those LUNs. At this stage we may choose to move the data or rezone the storage LUNs which represents the zone to a new host system.

3. Zone Configuration. at this stage we have to create the zone configuration on the new host using zonecfg command.

4. Attaching & if required update (-u) the zone. This will validate that the host is capable of supporting the zone before the attach can succeed. The zone is left in the "installed" state.

5. Boot the zone & have a fun as here you completes the zone migration.

Let's talk more about point #2.


How to Move the zonepath to a new Host?

There are several ways to create an archive of the zonepath. You can use the cpio or pax commands/utilities to archive your zonepath.

There are also several ways to transfer the archive to the new host. The mechanism used to transfer the zonepath from the source host to the destination depends on the local configuration. One can go for SCP, FTP or if it's on ZFS then zfs send/receive etc.

In some cases, such as a SAN, the zonepath data might not actually move. The SAN might simply be reconfigured so the zonepath is visible on the new host. This is what we do in our environment & that's the reason I prefer to have zoneroot on SAN.

Try before you do

Starting from Solaris 10 5/08, You can perform a trial run before the zone is moved to the new machine by using the “no execute” option,-n.


Here is the details how it actually works -

The zoneadm detach subcommand is used with the -n option to generate a manifest on a running zone without actually detaching the zone. The state of the zone on the originating system is not changed. The zone manifest is sent to stdout.

Then we can direct this output to a file or pipe it to a remote command to be immediately validated on the target host. The zoneadm attach subcommand is used with the -n option to read this manifest and verify that the target machine has the correct configuration to host the zone without actually doing an attach.

The zone on the target system does not have to be configured on the new host before doing a trial-run attach.

E.g.
gz1_source:/
# uname -m
sun4u

gz1_dest:/
# uname -m
sun4v

gz1_source:/
# zoneadm list -icv
ID NAME STATUS PATH BRAND IP
0 global running / native shared
7 zone1 running /zone1/zonepath native shared

 gz1_source:/
# zoneadm -z zone1 detach -n | ssh gz1_dest zoneadm attach -n -

The validation is output to the source host screen, which is stdout.

I hope this information will help me to get started with project work.

Amazon EC2 pricing models

Cloud computing is changing the way IT resources are utilized. Now a days cloud computing is one of the Innovated technology platform & emerging trend for IT industry & certainly not limited to it.

Cloud computing is a simple idea, but it can have a huge impact on business.

There are many vendors for enabling/providing cloud computing solutions like Amazon, VMWare, Rackspace and many more.

Today we will focus on Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud).

Amazon is a leading public cloud computing provider, AWS (Amazon Web Services) falls in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space, providing on demand service using virtual server instances with unique IP addresses and blocks of storage.

It's a news for me and may be for many of us that AWS opening a data center in Singapore to make its entry in the Asia Pacific region has created a lot of interest about Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in India.

So just to take a quick tour of AWS offerings - AWS provides various components/services like Amazon EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

As AWS is stepping in to Asia Pacific region I'm very excited to know what will be the pricing model for their service offerings. So let's take a look at their pricing model.

Amazon EC2 pricing models follows a "pay-as-you-go" model (as in any other cloud computing model) however the flexibility is at it's par in case of Amazon EC2 pricing model.

When it comes to Amazon EC2 pricing models, the instances are grouped into three families:
1. Standard,
2. High-Memory
3. High-CPU.

Amazon EC2 pricing for each of these instances is as follows:

1. Standard Instances -- This model have memory to CPU ratios suitable for most general purpose applications. This Amazon EC2 pricing model ranges from $0.12 per hour to $ 0.96 per hour, for services running on Windows infrastructure. For infrastructure running on Linux and UNIX, Amazon EC2 pricing starts with $0.095 per hour to $0.76 per hour.

2. High-Memory instances -- This Amazon EC2 pricing model offers larger memory sizes for high throughput applications, including database and memory caching applications. This is priced at $ 0.62 per hour to $2.88 per hour for Windows based infrastructure. For Linux/UNIX based instances in this pricing model of Amazon EC2, prices range from $0.57 per hour to $2.68 per hour.

3. High-CPU instances: In this Amazon EC2 pricing model, proportionally more CPU resources are consumed than memory (RAM), and as a a result it targets compute-intensive applications. This Amazon EC2 suite has been priced at $0.29 per hour to $1.16 per hour for Windows based infrastructure. For Linux or UNIX based infrastructure, this Amazon EC2 pricing model charges from $0.19 per hour to $0.76 per hour.



When choosing Amazon EC2 pricing types, organizations should consider characteristics of their application with regards to resource utilization. Accordingly, they should select the optimal instance family and size.

Now we have understood the pricing model & now next question comes in heart is how about support model so here we go -

here are two AWS Premium Support offerings—Gold and Silver. The following is the breakup of the services.


Gold Support includes:


-Business day support (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.)
-24x7x365 coverage.
-One-on-one support via web-based ticketing system.
-One-on-one support via telephone.
-1 hour maximum response time for "Urgent issues".
-Guaranteed response time for non-urgent issues.
-Client-side diagnostic tools.
-Named support contacts.


Silver Support includes:


-Business day support (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.).
-One-on-one support via web-based ticketing system.
-Guaranteed response time for non-urgent issues.
-Client-side diagnostic tools.
-Named support contacts.

I hope it's worth knowing all this information as a IT Infrastructure professional.

Also as we all know pictures talks louder & who agree to it then here is a very good video for understanding cloud computing in simple language.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdBd14rjcs0

Hope this article helps...

Creating CPU resource pool & Processor set in Solaris 10

Resource pools are used for partitioning server resources. It's a workload management framework.


I mostly work on Solaris servers with Oracle database hosted on it. Limited to subject, for my requirement I create CPU Pools to Support Oracle Licensing. All Global Zone servers running oracle containers should have at least one oracle cpu pool. The containers should be "bound" to this pool.

Oracle Licensing offered in two forms as far as know - CPU based & User based licenses.

How to create pools?

# pooladm -e       <<< The pools facility is not active by default when Solaris starts. pooladm -e explicitly activates the pools facility.

OPTION: If you wish to enbale resource pool fuction via SMF then just execute -

# /usr/sbin/svcadm enable svc:/system/pools:default

# pooladm -s      <<< Save the current configuration to /etc/pooladm.conf

# pooladm             <<< Shows current running pools configuration

Create Processor Set -

# poolcfg -c 'create pset oracle_pset (uint pset.min=4; uint pset.max=4)'     <<< pset.min & pset.max is consider the hardware thread.

Create resource pool -

# poolcfg -c 'create pool oracle_pool'     <<< Create pool

Associate resource pool & Processor Set -

# poolcfg -c 'associate pool oracle_pool (pset oracle_pset)'       <<< Associate pool with pset

NOTE: The global zones scheduler should be set to use FSS.
 Set the default scheduling class to FSS:

# dispadmin -d FSS

 # poolcfg -c 'modify pool oracle_pool (string pool.scheduler="FSS")'     <<< Enable FSS on pool

# pooladm -c      <<< Activate the configuration (After executing this command you can see /etc/pooladm.conf has been modified with current configuration)

Now once you're done creating & associating the pset & resource pool next thing to do is configure the Non-Global Zone configuration.

# zonecfg -z zone1
zonecfg:zone1> set pool=oracle_pool
zonecfg:zone1> exit

Once the zone configuration has been altered then you can bind the resource pool to zone using -

# poolbind -p oracle_pool -i zoneid

This procedure demonstrate on how to create CPU/Processor sets, resource pools, binding them to containers like activities.

Hope this will help.

FATAL: system is not bootable, boot command is disabled

In system administration job normally no news is a good news... Today I was working with Solaris MPxIO on V890 server model & due to some unknown MPxIO misconfiguration under /kernel/drv/fp.conf - the whole system got messed up & I left with option of rebuilding the whole system.

Here is the crash pattern after MPxIO misconfiguration -

Rebooting with command: boot



Boot device: /pci@8,600000/SUNW,qlc@2/fp@0,0/disk@w21000014c3dbf465,0:a File and args:
SunOS Release 5.10 Version Generic_142900-01 64-bit
Copyright 1983-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.
NOTICE: error reading device label


NOTICE:


***************************************************
* This device is not bootable!                    *
* It is either offlined or detached or faulted.   *
* Please try to boot from a different device.     *
***************************************************


NOTICE: spa_import_rootpool: error 19
Cannot mount root on /pci@8,600000/SUNW,qlc@2/fp@0,0/disk@w21000014c3dbf465,0:a
fstype zfs
panic[cpu7]/thread=180e000: vfs_mountroot: cannot mount root
000000000180b950 genunix:vfs_mountroot+358 (800, 200, 0, 1872800, 189b400, 18cbc00)


Thank god that the system was not rolled out to production yet.

When I realized the system is crashed & I may need to boot the system into single user mode for maintenance I logged onto the SC and got to my console, and type boot as one does.


{1} ok boot
FATAL: system is not bootable, boot command is disabled
Ohh.. no.. What the mess...

There are many errors which you never imagine or unseen throughout your tiny professional life & I hit this one today, for the first time in my 6 years of professional life.

Just in case you happen to hit this horrible error then here is the fix -

set auto-boot? to false, reset the box, and then set it to true and finally boot  as shown below -

{1} ok setenv auto-boot? false
auto-boot? = false
{1} ok reset-all
SC Alert: Host System has Reset
Sun Fire V890, No Keyboard
Copyright 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
OpenBoot 4.22.34, 65536 MB memory installed, Serial #XXXXX.
Ethernet address X:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX, Host ID: XXXXX.
{1} ok setenv auto-boot? true

auto-boot? = true
{1} ok boot net - install nowin

.......... lots of output ........

This will rebuild your system now.

One advice - BE ALWAYS CAREFUL WHILE WORKING WITH MPxIO. YOUR BEST FRIEND MAY TURN INTO WORST ENEMY IF YOU HURT HIM...