Jerry Jelinek's blog

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I’ve been at Joyent for a week now and its been pretty overwhelming.  There are so many new things to learn.  I know thats normal when you start at a new job, but I had been at Sun for so long, and learned all of the ins and outs, that I had kind of forgotten how much there is to learn when you start a new job.  One of the things I’m so happy about is the excitement here at Joyent.  Its a real startup atmosphere with tons of work to do, talented engineers who are busy on a ten different projects at once, and a real feeling that we’re out to make a difference.  I’m sure I’ll have more to post once I get unburied, but for now, all I can say is that its great to be here!

I have worked at Sun, and now Oracle, for longer than I really want to admit,
but I have reached
a point in my career where I feel that I need to try something new.
Today, September 13th, 2010, is my last day at Oracle. For the past 5 years
I’ve worked on zones. The zones team is such an outstanding group of engineers
and I’m going to miss working with them. I’ve learned a lot from them, as well
as all of the other engineers at Sun that I have been privileged to work with over
the years.

Now, I’m moving on to something new. Tomorrow I start work at
Joyent. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to
blog more than I’ve done recently. My blog is moving to
dtrace.org. I’ll continue to work
on zones, and Solaris in general, at Joyent, and I’m excited about the new
new challenges ahead. There are obviously a lot of changes going on with
Solaris right now, so its going to interesting. And fun!

For the past 9 or 10 months I’ve been pretty much heads down working with
Jordan
on the
Solaris 10 branded zone
project. Yesterday we
integrated
the first phase of this project into OpenSolaris.
This brand allows you to run the
Solaris 10 10/09
release, or later, inside of a zone running on
OpenSolaris.
We see this brand as one of the tools which will help people as they
transition from running Solaris 10 to OpenSolaris.

We’ve divided this project into two phases. For this initial integration
we have the following features:

  • basic brand emulation
    The brand emulation works for running the latest version of Solaris 10
    (Solaris 10 10/09) on OpenSolaris.
    A zone running this brand is intended to be functionally equivalent to a
    native zone on Solaris 10 10/09 with the same configuration.
  • p2v
    A physical-to-virtual capability to install an archive of a system running
    Solaris 10 10/09 into the branded zone
  • v2v
    A virtual-to-virtual capability to install an archive of a native zone from
    a system running Solaris 10 10/09 into the branded zone
  • multiple architecture support
    This brand runs on all sun4u, sun4v and x86 architecture machines that
    OpenSolaris has defined as supported platforms

There are a few limitations with this initial version of the code which
we’ll work on in the second phase of the project. We’ll be adding support
for:

  • Exclusive IP stack zones
  • Delegated ZFS datasets
  • The ability to run these branded zones on a system running xVM
  • The ability to upgrade the version of Solaris 10 running inside the
    zone to a later release of Solaris 10

We’ve done extensive testing of the brand using our internal Solaris 10
test suites and a variety of 3rd party applications.
Now that the code has integrated, we’re looking forward to getting
feedback from more people about their real-world experiences running
their own Solaris 10 application stacks inside the zone. If you give this
branded zone a try, let us hear about your experiences on the OpenSolaris
zones-discuss
alias.

I’ll be delivering two presentations at
Community One
this year. My slides are posted on the
wiki
in case you want to download them. I like to use my slides
as an outline instead of just reading them, so hopefully people
who are attending will
actually get some value from hearing me speak. 🙂
Don’t forget that the Tuesday Deep Dive is free if you
register with the OSDDT code.
There a several ways to get into the deep dives if you
are planning on attending. All of these are on the
wiki.

The Deploying OpenSolaris Deep Dive on Tuesday at
Community One
is free if you register using the promotional code OSDDT. The session doesn’t start until
11:00 am so that people can still attend the JaveOne key note.

Chris Armes will start with an overview
of deploying OpenSolaris in the data center. After lunch
Ben Rockwood
will be delivering a two hour presentation on ZFS. This promises to be the highlight
of the session.
Nick, one of my co-authors on the
OpenSolaris Bible,
will then talk about high availability and I’ll wrap up with a talk on how to use zones
for consolidation.

Jordan just posted a nice
blog
about the work we’ve been doing for
Solaris 10 branded zones
running on
OpenSolaris.
His post also has a link to a Flash demo we put together
showing the process of migrating a standalone Solaris 10 system into a zone
on OpenSolaris. Both of us will be at
Community One West
and we’ll be running the branded zone in the virtualization pod. If you’re there and interested, stop
by to check it out. I’ll also be talking about this project as part of my presentations.

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