While the costs of managing a data center are becoming a major concern with the increased number of under-utilized servers, customers are actively looking for solutions to consolidate their workloads to:

• improve server utilization
• improve data center space utilization
• reduce power and cooling requirements
• lower capital and operating expenditures
• reduce carbon footprint, ..

To cater those customers, Sun offers several virtualization technologies such as Logical Domains, Solaris Containers, xVM at free of cost for SPARC and x86/x64 platforms.

In order to help our customers who are planning for the consolidation of their MySQL databases on systems running Solaris 10, we put together a document with a bunch of installation steps and the best practices to run MySQL inside a Solaris Container. Although the document was focused on the Solaris Containers technology, …

While the costs of managing a data center are becoming a major concern with the increased number of under-utilized servers, customers are actively looking for solutions to consolidate their workloads to:

• improve server utilization
• improve data center space utilization
• reduce power and cooling requirements
• lower capital and operating expenditures
• reduce carbon footprint, ..

To cater those customers, Sun offers several virtualization technologies such as Logical Domains, Solaris Containers, xVM at free of cost for SPARC and x86/x64 platforms.

In order to help our customers who are planning for the consolidation of their MySQL databases on systems running Solaris 10, we put together a document with a bunch of installation steps and the best practices to run MySQL inside a Solaris Container. Although the document was focused on the Solaris Containers technology, …

Just a small tip for using Bazaar on OpenSolaris: set the BZR_SSH environment variable to openssh if you don't have the Python module Paramiko installed.
For example, in your ~/.bashrc:

export BZR_SSH=openssh

Could be useful if you're pulling MySQL stuff from Launchpad and use (Open)Solaris. Could also be useful on other Unix-like operating systems when the default is missing (Bazaar uses Paramiko as default).

Now that FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels, Belgium is over, it's about time for a conclusion/summary. I've been to FOSDEM for about five times as both an attendee and speaker, but this year I was much more involved. On Saturday, I gave a lightning talk about "Why you should use Bazaar for maintaining your OSS project". On Sunday, I gave a talk about "MySQL High Availability Solutions" in the main conference track. Both went fairly well and there was good feedback from audience. I've uploaded the slides for both talks to the FOSDEM 2009 page on the MySQL Forge Wiki, video recordings of the sessions should be available on the …

This was an interview Jack Adams did with me at the MySQL/OpenSolaris booth at FOSDEM last weekend. Jack adams is an OpenSolaris mascotte, look around on YouTube for more funny interviews with him.

These are my spoken notes from last week's earnings call - rather than recraft them, I figured I'd simply republish.

_______________________________

And thank you all for joining us this afternoon. 

I'll start with some perspective on our Q2 results and the current climate, then follow-up with commentary on our products disclosure - slides 6 and 7 in the slide deck. Then I'll turn it over to Mike Lehman (Sun's CFO) for commentary on financial metrics, and an update on the restructuring plan we announced back in November.

Overall, results for Q2 were in line with what we expected, as macro worries factored into customer discussions across all geographies. These concerns resulted in decisions related to higher end system purchases being pushed out - so billings were down year over year for SPARC Enterprise …

My presentation at LOSUG on tuesday went down like a house on fire - I think it would be safe to say that the phrase for the evening was ‘It’s a cache!’.

For that to make sense, you need to look at the slides, which are now available here.

Attendance was great, but it seems the last minute change of day meant that some people missed the session. We had 151 people register, and about 80 turned up on the night.

Next Tuesday (27th Jan), I’ll be speaking at the London OpenSolaris User Group again. For those that follow the LOSUG meetings, we normally the third thursday of the month, but due to the overwhelming popularity of the event this month (more 100 registrations so far) we have had to push the event back to the last Tuesday of the month.

This month, I’ll be talking about the DTrace probes that we have added into MySQL and demonstrating their use and functionality. Along the way I’ll also cover some of the internals of MySQL and how it works (and how they relate to the DTrace probes we’ve added), how to use the probes to analyze and diagnose your queries, and how I’ve already used the DTrace probes to provide information up to the Query Analysis functionality within …

There are a couple of bookstores in my neighborhood. They could not be more different from one another.

The first is known to focus on best seller lists, to promote popular books, and use displays and traditional retail techniques to drive business. They seem to do well, year in, year out. The other bookstore is more of a community treasure, beloved by the neighborhood, with a focus on the (thoughtful) insights of their staff. Those insights are delivered via small note cards appended to shelving throughout the store, where books are displayed alphabetically, with library-like neutrality.

The first store is very market focused, changes with the season, and seems to be quite succesful. The latter store, beloved though it may be, struggles to stay in business.

Now you might consider that an awkward …

Here is a blog entry that was sitting in my Drafts folder for a long time (just because I didn't realize :). Anyway, it shows how to install Open Solaris 2008/11 on Virtual Box. The original install was done using Virtual Box 2.0.6. I installed Virtual Box 2.1 this morning and the image was easily recognized by the updated Virtual Box.

Here are the basic steps.


Create a new VM ...



As part of the previous step, create a new Virtual Disk mapping to the downloaded Open Solaris image ...

…