Parolski.com

Sun has released a new blade module for their Sun Blade 8000 system, the x8450 . With 128GB of RAM in a single module and sixteen hardware threads per module, that means you get 160 threads and 1280GB of RAM in 19 rack units. Pworrrr! If these modules were used in the Sun Blade 8000p, that would give the same performance in just 14 rack units! So in a 42U rack, you can get three of these units in, totaling: 3840GB of RAM, 480 Hardware threads!!!Fantastic! Just make sure you warn your electric supplier!

If theres anyone out there who thought that the Teletubbies were pushing the boundaries of baby tv madness, be prepared for this boohbah.com

The site is mental and makes you wonder if theres a manufacturer out there that makes a pointing device suitable for 2 year olds. The question is…how long did you spend on the site!

So you’ve just installed Solaris because of the well-deserved praise regarding ZFS, SMF, predictive self healing, Zones and Dtrace. And then you said, “It runs vmware, right?”. Well, to my knowledge, no. Not quite. It does run xVM (a breed of “bare metal” type 1 hypervisor, which is very similar to xen.

But more interestingly, it also runs VirtualBox, a type 2 hypervisor which works pretty much like vmware server. This really is a great step to bringing virtualisation to the desktop for Solaris users

All you need to do is download the package, extract and and install it. From there on in, you can use the GUI to create a GuestOS and be running those apps you need! Crucially, it supports the following as Guest OS:

• Windows XP
• Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 works a treat)
• Solaris!
• …and many other OS, a list can he found here

A little tip to install XP in less than 10 mins:

Make a copy of the disc image as a .ISO file. Then copy that disc image to

/tmp

Be prepared for a hit on the RAM, as thats where /tmp is mounted! Then, before you start the Guest OS for the first time, configure it to mount the disc image from /tmp

Using your main memory as the install medium only leaves the processor and disc writes as your bottlenecks, making installs go really quick!!!

Of course, once your Guest OS is installed, be sure to delete the disc image you copied into /tmp

Happy hypervising! (its probably not a real word, but its great for telling people who aren’t into computing….”yeah, I’ve been hypervising for a few days now now….”.

your friend “…..hmmm, is that bad for your health?”

This is going to be the fist in a series of random tests (completely unscientific) that I perform on an x86 machine with Solaris 10 installed.

This week, it consists of pulling out an IDE drive having just told StarOffice to save an open file. No preparation, no telling Solaris what was going to happen, simply pull the drive whilst Solaris was up and running. I can’t think why you might want to do this, but it seemed like a fun test. First, the power cable was pulled out, then the data cable.

The test results: you guessed it, when the drive was pulled, no requests for anything that wasn’t already in main memory hung. This included StarOffice hanging, waiting for the destination drive to be reachable before it could let me try and save the file to disk.

As soon as the drive was connected back up again (data cable first, then power), the system was happy again, and StarOffice proceeded to save the file!

I should point out that the disks was not part of any RAID configuration