Inchoate Curmudgeon

I was able to attend Sun’s Customer Engineering Conference (CEC) in Las Vegas last week. These are the sessions I attended:

• “Turning ‘Blue Shift’ Datacenter into ‘Red Shift’ Enabler”, Eric Bezille and Michel Kintz
• “Project Indiana”, Glynn Foster
• “Virtualization: Technology, Performance and Benchmarking”, Jim Mauro and Tariq Magdon-Ismail
• “Intel EMT64 Quad-Core Deepdive”, Eric Markwardt
• “Demonstrating Ruby and Ruby on Rails (RoR) Development with NetBeans 6 in Web2.0 era”, Takashi Shitamichi and Ken Pepple
• “Networking Performance and Tuning in the Virtualization World: LDoms and xVM”, Jing Zhang and Amitabha Banerjee
• “Full Contact Debugging with the Solaris Run Time Linker”, Clive King and Chris Gerhard
• “Using Crossbow: Network Virtualization and Flow Management”, Steffen Weiberle and Michael Haines

I was signed up for three more sessions that I missed, and found myself on overload with attending the ones I did.

Turning ‘Blue Shift’ Datacenter into ‘Red Shift’ Enabler

This session was a review of Zones (Solaris Containers) and ZFS adoption by two very different customers, documenting their motivations and lessons learned in the view of the Sun team assisting these customers by Eric and Michel. Two aspects of the presentation were particularly helpful:

1. The importance of simple, prescriptive guidance to customers adopting Zones as a virtualization strategy that assists effective, simple adoption as a foundation for more complex exploration of the capabilities of Zones and ZFS.
2. A discussion of an ROI model for Zones versus monolithic OS instance deployment. This part of the presentation provided a framework for reasoned discussions of the relative costs of managing and operating a Zones infrastructure versus stand-alone OS instances.

Project Indiana

Glynn did a great job in this presentation explaining the next evolution of OpenSolaris development, which will be very focused on eliminating the barriers to adoption presented by Solaris installation tools and distribution size (OMG its huge) as well as package management processes and tools. Another key goal of Indiana is to simplify the job of building and packaging custom distributions of OpenSolaris. There was also a brief demo of the new installer which is currently shipping with recent versions of Nevada.

Virtualization: Technology, Performance and Benchmarking

Its always a joy to see a reasoned “by the numbers” approach to understanding the performance and scaling implications of any set of similar technologies. Tariq gave an excellent overview contrasting key compute virtualization technologies and concepts. Jim discussed the performance and comparative benchmarks he has been collecting on various compute virtualization technologies. This kind of information is essential for engineers and architects crafting the right solutions for their customers based on their customer requirements and the technical capabilities of competing choices.

The discussion and interpretation of the underpinning architectural differences that explain the relative performance characteristics of the key technologies is “just what the doctor ordered” for anyone leveraging the prevalent compute virtualization technologies.

Intel EMT64 Quad-Core Deepdive

This session provided an overview of the Intel roadmap with mapping on to current and future Sun product offerings. Of particular interest to me was a deeper appreciation and understanding of where processor technology is headed with respect to virtualization assistance and multi-core, multi-threaded architectures.

Demonstrating Ruby and Ruby on Rails (RoR) Development with NetBeans 6 in Web2.0 era

It’s a joy to see how Sun is embracing the Ruby and Ruby in Rails communities. This is big-time redshift stuff in my estimation. This session provided a good overview of Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework, along with a delightful demonstration showing how easy it is to develop Rails and Ruby applications with Netbeans. I probably could have chosen a different session for this time-slot since I’ve been dabbling with RoR, glassfish and Ruby for a while, but couldn’t help myself. You can only take so much of the fire-hose without some relief, and I really wanted to see and meet Ken and Shitamichi-san.

The work and focus represented by this presentation is absolutely critical to Sun’s continued understanding and cultivation of the vibrant RoR community inside and outside Sun.

Networking Performance and Tuning in the Virtualization World: LDoms and xVM

This was a thorough presentation of the network performance and scaling implications of LDOMs and xVM, including some of the benchmark results for testing of these technologies. The presentation also described several tuning parameters that may be helpful for LDOM networking performance. This session, along with the session I attended on Crossbow, has given me a much deeper appreciation of the implications of various networking technologies on virtualization.

Full Contact Debugging with the Solaris Dynamic Linker

This session was a bit of a fun geek-out for me, given my background as a C++ coder prior to joining Sun. This session provided a fairly thorough overview of the mechanisms for manipulating the behavior of the runtime dynamic linker, and various tools to track down what’s going on when your application is loading libraries. Clive and Chris demonstrated one delightful trick to allow applications in different zones to run at different times. I’ve actually run into situations where this could be extremely useful for running shared QA environments in Zones. This was the precise customer Use Case that motivated Chris and Clive to develop of the tip.

Using Crossbow: Network Virtualization and Flow Management

This session was a mind bender. I confess that part of this perception must be attributed to my long-standing predisposition to characterize anything to do with networking as black magic.

Of particular interest with respect to Crossbow was the configuration and management of two key technologies: IP Instances an Virtual Interfaces. Crossbow is a set of technologies warranting extended serious study, lab work and discussion to fully understand and use.

I suppose one of the more challenging practical realizations with respect to Crossbow facilities is the fact that portions of the Crossbow technologies and bits exist in differing forms in xVM, Nevada and Solaris 10; the implementations are not currently identical. I hope this converges soon.

Summary

After slogging through the most technical, bleeding edge sessions I could find at CEC on virtualization, there’s no doubt that Sun is rapidly elaborating and deploying an impressive and unmatched array of technologies for network and compute virtualization.

It’s obvious that the tremendous flexibility and power of all the various combinations of networking and compute virtualization will only be matched by our collective ability to leverage and combine these in a way to confound human understanding and wedge the biggest machine money can buy. This is not a good thing, but it’s somewhat inevitable with any new and powerful set of facilities. We need to collectively endeavor to leverage this power and technology to effective, sensible implementations. CEC gave me plenty to think about, play with, talk about and blog about for a while.

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