Creating Solaris 11 Vagrant boxes out of Unified Archives

I am using Vagrant with Virtualbox for many years to automate test environments on my notebook. I absolutely love it, it allows me to spin up Solaris and Linux virtual machines in any way I need it. If you also have a need for a very convenient and affordable LAB environment, give it a try.

There is an additional challenge if you want to use Solaris VMs. Because there are no prepared Solaris base images (aka boxes), which you could just download from the web. I assume it is legally not allowed to redistribute Solaris.

Luckily Solaris has already a very powerful technology for handling OS images Unified Archives (UARs), which you likely use already for your OS deployment. In this post I will show how you can convert a Unified Archive hands-free in approximately 10 minutes into a Vagrant box.

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zpool-zones-vio.d - ZFS statistics per zpool and per zone

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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oracle-pwrite-zfs-latency.d: Detect slow sync writes on ZFS

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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