IBM likes to talk about “autonomic computing,” in which at its core is a self-management mechanism for a system or systems. Sun, which is normally good at dreaming up such monikers, doesn’t hang a name like that on Solaris 10, which is available now in beta and will be generally available in September. But “autonomic” would certainly describe some of the key features in the upcoming release.
Solaris 10 will include self-diagnostic, self-repairing features
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Thats pretty cool.
Well, I have to admit that Solaris is *it* for the high end. I mean, Linux can’t compete at this level yet, and big-iron Windows is just a joke. If I ever run an enterprise, I’d want Solaris and Sun servers powering the core, without any doubt.
But at the low and, on small servers and workstations, I find Solaris to be difficult to work with. All the power is wasted, and it simply doesn’t have the “just works” polish that modern Linux has in many areas.
Anyway, I hope we’ll get to play with Solaris 10 soon; unfortunately, our scientific unit is so stuffed with Windows weenies now that Unix may soon be pushed out altogether….
While the larger points about DTrace are certainly correct, the details on how DTrace has been used are a little off-base. So before you accuse me of being a double-talking marketing droid, check out my correction: http://blogs.sun.com/bmc
with the automaton computer (one that replaces it’s own failed hardware) and then you’re really talking Skynet. I don’t mean failover redundant systems either. So you’d end up with autonomic automatonic computing. Taa-Daa!
“Cantrill said that DTrace quickly traced the problem to a wild-card desktop applet that had somehow gotten channeled into the central system. The stock ticker applet was automatically creating and destroying pixmaps at the rate of thousands a minute, and the calls were driving the servers nuts. DTrace identified the problem in minutes.”
If people would only remember to shutdown their computers when they’re going to be out of the office for extended periods of time, things like this could be avoided. Of course, if they had had Solaris 10 installed on this rogue computer, it would have repaired itself and no one would have been the wiser.
Actually, no “shutting down their computers” was not an option.
The whole point was that this was on a sunray server. When you are finished working, you pull your sunray card out and your session will follow you to the next sunray that you plug your card in to.
The actual problem was a poorly written application that six people were running.
The point of the narrative was that it would have been next to impossible to get to the root cause of the problem without Dtrace.
If they are talking about “self healing” servers like IBM’s, then the feature they are trying to describe is Fault Management (fmd). This is new to Beta 4 and is hardware specific, if you are not using UltraSPARC III or IV systems, Fault Management will not work.
http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/817-0547/6mgbdbsmf?a=view
Sun is probably the most vocal player in the Unix market. Knowing that and knowing what they have come up with in the last years one can be pretty sure that most of the stuff
they announce won’t be used within this decade, it just will not be ready for enterprise users.
So lads relax and don’t believe the hype …
Seems to me it will be available in Solaris 10.
This kind of work is why I like Sun.
Due Diligence.
Fastidious effort to increase the reliability and stability of the os.
This is what you pay for when you go with Sun.
Know the difference between available and enterprise ready ?
Sun always makes their products with the enterprise in mind. Even JDS, which s being marketed to general populations is actually a frontend/client desktop for enterprise environments.
It’s not the end all be all, there still is AIX and IRIX and some others. Regardless, I’d like to play around with this too.
I did take a look at Dtrace somewhat. Yeah! more platform specific scripting to learn… I still haven’t found a single thing to be excited about with the release of Solaris 10. You guys really need to spend ALOT of time with the ease of use aspects of Solaris. Just simple enhancments would go alot way in making our life(the SA’s) alot easier.
Got any specific suggestions?
Got any specific suggestions?
1. add a tool similiar to SAM in HP-UX or smitty in AIX.
2. LVM!!!! or a decent software raid system(that works and is easy to use !Solstice) to use for at least mirroring
3. Other simple tools for setting up network installing packages,configuring kernels and other system services NIS etc..
Like i said in the past i am more than capable of using the command line to do most of these setup tasks. However, GUI’s are quick and easy and maximize productivity which in turn translates into labor cost savings to companies using Solaris.
Regarding #3, have you checked out blastwave – http://www.blastwave.org ? They have a Debian-esque front-end to Sun’s package system with over 600 packages in their repository. You can do things like `pkg-get install gimp`, and it will connect to a package repository, fetch the package and its dependencies, and install them. It’s a really nice setup. I wish Sun would help them out – both financially and by donating some hardware. I’m a maintainer for them, and they need some financial help.