OpenSolaris was dropped by Oracle As many people already suspected, Oracle will ditch OpenSolaris as announced here: OpenSolaris cancelled, to be replaced with Solaris 11 Express. The first Solaris 11 Express release is expected end of this year. If is has similar usage restrictions like the Oracle 10 Express database then it will be quite useless. OpenSolaris was a good thing for both, Sun and its customers. Customers had a continuous preview of upcoming features in new Solaris versions. Sun ….Read More
Experiences with RHEL6 Beta 2.1
Like promised I’ll keep you updated on the RHEL6b2.1. The “official name” is not Beta2.1, it is “Beta 2 refresh”. Why not calling it Beta3? Anyway: The good news first: In contrary to the first release of Beta 2, it works fine again! The first release of Beta2 was quite crappy, it was not installable as a KVM guest. This was obviously due to severe bugs in some virtio drivers. So, what are the news? 1. The bugs in the ….Read More
What is possibly going into RHEL6 GA and what is not
As I wrote different times before, RHEL6 is going to have a Kernel based on upstreams 2.6.32 Kernel. Meanwhile Linus Torvalds and his fellows released 2.6.34. Since then – from a System Engineers Point of view – there have some “minor” changes which are affecting the daily work in enterprise environments. I think that Red Hat is aware that RHEL6 is one of its most important releases made so far. RHEL6 Beta-Testers have acknowledged that this is one of the ….Read More
Red Hat’s virtualization strategy has redundancy – Quo vadis?
A couple of days there have been some reports that Red Hat will release a commercialized version of deltacloud, an abstraction layer for different kinds of virtualization technologies and clouds such as VMware, RHEV, Amazon EC2 etc. Red Hat puts a lot of resources on virtualization, they maintain and/or sponsor multiple projects in parallel. The most important from my point of view is libvirt which is as well an abstraction layer for different virtulization technologies such as VMware, KVM, Xen ….Read More
A brief test of OTRS::ITSM Changemanagement and the insanity of ITIL compliant software
OTRS is known as best-of-breed in open source incident management systems. Since quite some time, OTRS made its product ITIL V3 compliant. Means: It also comes with a change management module. At work we use a complex and extremely user-unfriedly software. This brought me to the idea to test the OTRS change management module in order to propose OTRS as a replacement for the currently used software for the Change- Incident- and Problem Management. Incident- and Change Management integration I ….Read More
IUS Community RPMs for Red Hats RHEL
I was criticizing that software in RHEL is too outdated for web servers quite soon after release, see my blog post http://blog.delouw.ch/2010/05/02/rhel6-as-a-web-server/. While this is true for a system fully supported by Red Hat, I learned an alternative from a comment on the post. This alternative is the so called IUS community repository. About the IUS Community Project The project was launched in September 2009. In spite of being a young project, it has a history. At Rackspace, a large ….Read More
KVM supports live migration between CPUs with different features
The video is a bit old, it is from November 2008. But it is still quite interesting to see and discuss about it. With KVM you can upgrade your farm of servers easy, it does not matter if the new servers have CPUs with new features or not. I’m not sure if you can do this with ESX, I guess not, you probably need to migrate them shut down. httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuhU6jJjpAQ Have fun!
An example why open source software is cool
Recently I have set up an Apache Tomcat. As a replacement for the Tomcat manager I deployed Psi-Probe for easy deployment and access to statistics. Afterwards I installed the production software which needs to add a JVM parameter user.country=CH to have the proper date and time format used in Switzerland. This had a unwanted side-effect to Psi-Probe. The Interface switched to German, no way to switch the language back to English. Since my mother tongue is German, no big deal ….Read More