I will be at Oracle Openworld 2014, finally as speaker. Together with Glynn Foster and Eric Saxe I will talk about Puppet on Solaris. There are still some free seats, so register if you are interested:

Session: Best Practice Configuration Management with Puppet [CON7849]

A few days before I will also attend the Automation event of the year. This time I will finally take part on my first PuppetConf in person. The line-up is amazing with speakers like Gene Kim the author of “The Phoenix Project” and many other early drivers of the DevOps community.

I am in San Francisco from 23rd September to 2nd October, if you like to meet in person just ping me.

Another script, which provides a missing feature to Oracle Solaris 10/11: ZFS statistics per zpool and per zone.

The ZFS in Oracle Solaris 10 and 11 is still not completely ready for a single pool setup, for some applications it makes sense to use multiple pools. In general, if one workload stresses the single zpool too much, the performance of the other workloads can be degraded. Therefore it’s still best practice to use multiple pools, for example the “Configuring ZFS for an Oracle Database” white paper suggests to use at least an own pool for the redo-logs.

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The first DTrace integration into the Oracle 12c database was finally reverse engineered in great detail by Andrey Nikolaev. Finally we have a good documentation how the V$KERNEL_IO_OUTLIER view really works.

The standalone kernel_io_oulier.d DTrace script works great even on Solaris 10 and pre-12c Oracle databases, but only on RAW-devices and ASM. Oracle pushes ASM because of good arguments, but sometimes one likes to use a filesystem.

We have some databases on ZFS and so I was jealous that the script does not work with ZFS. Therefore I tried to make a similar script for ZFS.

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Last month, on the first Vienna Solaris Technical Day, I had the opportunity to make a small presentation about a simple method for drawing nice graphs from Solaris performance metrics. As several people asked me for the details, I will share them here.
The concept is simple, just use the Solaris command line utilities, like iostat and send the reformatted output to the popular open source tool Graphite.

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As mentioned in the previous post I am working on a tool which collects essential information of Linux and Solaris systems. The first release is finally public available on GitHub (collect_sysinfo.py).

Why have I written this tool? I needed it for my job and I found no other tool, which fulfilled our requirements. Additionally it was a nice opportunity to train my Python and RegEx skills.

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Keeping the documentation of the IT infrastructure by hand up to date is not really a lot of fun nor exciting, but still necessary. More automation in this area would be nice. After looking for an “Enterprise solution” for some months, I think there is no off-the-shelf solution which fulfills all our needs.

Therefore I started to develop a basic discovery script, which should discover all important information of our Solaris and Linux servers and feeds the info in our CMDB. Most of the stuff is straight forward and at best a opportunity to improve my Regex skills, but there are also some challenges which could be interesting for others.

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