Remora OVM management app for Splunk: life gets better

We're currently working on a Splunk app for OVM management--a set of tools to help admins work out what's up with their pool, servers, guests, and the OVM Manager system. We use it in house for this very thing. So when one of our guests has a disk that's getting full, we can see it immediately on our dashboard and move things or add storage as needed. No guesswork--no surprises.

Streamlining Linux configuration for Oracle deployments

Oracle has recently added a new rpm aimed at simplifying the deployment of RDBMS 10g or 11g on to Oracle Linux systems. This rpm--'oracle-validated'--carries out many tasks which will be familiar not only to Linux users, but also those who have successfully used Solaris JumpStart for much the same purpose.

In brief, it does the following:

• Installs the packages and dependencies needed to successfully run the database
• Creates the required users
• Modifies kernel parameters and other system settings as required

This automates a lot of the routine configuration needed for any Oracle database installation, and is definitely a win for hard-pressed sysadmins. You can find more details here:

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-admin/ginnydbinstallonlinux-488779.html?msgid=3-5784744152

Big Data --> Big Business?

Splunk has announced that it will be making an initial USD $125M offering of common stock in CQ1 2012. This marks the transition from over-achieving small fry to a possible new heavyweight in the tech sector--Splunk's business grew 68% last year.
Remora congratulate Splunk's founders and engineers on having arrived at this point, and wish them success with the IPO.
More details can be found at

• http://www.splunk.com/page/company_news

Go (somewhat) mobile

Splunk 4.3 has recently been announced and we've been testing it out in the lab. One of the more hyped features is mobility, and this has been achieved using JSChart instead of flash, as many devices do not support Flash. It's obviously pretty early days for this feature. There are some limitations:

• If your dashboard uses simple XML and you use a charting property that is unsupported by JSChart, Splunk uses FlashChart, the Flash-based charting module, to render that chart instead. This means that the chart displays incorrectly in iOS mobile devices.
• If your dashboard uses advanced XML, you need to explicitly define which charting module each chart in the dashboard uses: JSChart or FlashChart. If you are editing the advanced XML for a chart that uses the JSChart module and you add an JSChart-unsupported property, Splunk simply ignores the unsupported property.

This would appear to imply rework needed on existing charts and dashboards, if you need to expose these for mobile users.

Full details are here: http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/4.3/Developer/AdvancedCharting

We eat our own tinned products...

Remora recommends and is implementing Oracle Virtual Machine (OVM) for many of our customers. But what a lot of people don't know is that we've been using it ourselves for over a year. We have migrated a server-room full of noisy, power-hungry systems onto just three Oracle Sun X86 servers with OVM version 2.2 and a Sun ZFS storage appliance. Oracle has recently released OVM version 3 which includes a greatly improved management layer and the latest version of the Xen engine which underpins it.

OVM gives us high availability and live migration of guest systems, so that on the rare occasions we need to perform routine maintenance, we can keep our critical systems running while part of the server pool is down. Another significant advantage of OVM is a substantial cost saving, of the order of 80%, compared to another well-known and widely-deployed virtualisation framework, including licensing and implementation services.

So, if your virtualisation vendor's bills are bringing tears to your eyes, you might want to consider an alternative that is production-ready and working right now.

Not content with that, Remora has extended the OVM management interface with status reports and metrics provided through a Splunk application we've developed in-house. The two products work beautifully together, and Remora is the leading partner in Australia for both Oracle and Splunk. This is no accident, and it's not buzz-word synergy--it's actual synergy.

It doesn't have to be hard

A common problem we've encountered is the need to replicate storage between sites for availability, performance or disaster recovery.

In the absence of any open standard for storage replication, this can be difficult to do across storage vendors and even across products from the same vendor.

It can be easily handled in sites which run Oracle Solaris, however, thanks to Storagetek Availability Suite. This particular solution can provide point in time snapshots and/or remote mirroring with _any_ storage connected to a solaris server. A link to information about this most interesting--and unique--product is here:

• http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/storage-software/034791.pdf

Other replication solutions available from Oracle work with storage devices from the same family--the Unified Storage or 7000 series, or the Pillar Axiom range of storage systems. Sun Cluster also supports vendor specific replication from Hitachi and EMC, as well as Oracle Data Guard and MySQL replication.

There are thus multiple ways to tackle this particular issue.

Installation and operational mentoring

Remora provided an installation service with a difference for Ford Motor Company of Australia, for one of their Oracle Sun M5000 servers.

In addition to physically installing the system into the rack, commissioning it and checking correct operation, we had the opportunity to provide Ford staff with on the spot training and mentoring in the various methods of administering Dynamic System Domains (DSD) on the server.

DSD allows authorised staff to re-allocate system resources--while they are live--to different workloads, called domains, inside the server. It is one of several virtualisation technologies provided in Oracle products.

Each Domain may be regarded as an independent box-within-a-box from both a hardware and software standpoint. DSD can be administered either by a secure web interface, or by the command line from a console session.

We even uncovered an undocumented feature of the interface on the day, and were able to provide Ford with additional information about it.