Oracle Solaris Cluster Essentials by Author’s Name

Oracle Solaris Cluster Essentials (Oracle Solaris System Administration Series)

Oracle Solaris Cluster Essentials

This is a review of Tim Read: Oracle Solaris Cluster Essentials technical book kindle addition.
This book is a must read for every IT professional who runs or plan to run their applications on Sun/Oracle servers. In the today’s data centers using clusters for making services highly available is an absolute necessity (if you want to keep your job) to meet the uptime demand of applications and services. Solaris Cluster is an industry standard software that is integrated into the Solaris operating system kernel. This integration makes it secure, fast and very reliable. The book title says “Essentials” and it lives up to it. It has all the essential components you need to understand not only the cluster software but also the surrounding technologies it uses or built on. It gives you the basics and it drills into a deeper level for the components and has pictures, diagrams and command line examples to also make it very practical for every day use as well.

Details:

Tim Read gives you with basic terms, definitions puts Solaris Cluster in place explains where it adds value to your computing environment. After the general discussion. It dives into cluster architecture and explains the various server and storage configurations. The information you receive here is very helpful when you plan your implementation it makes aware of the various technologies and gets you think of high availability from the first steps. Cluster by itself will give you higher availability but you will not realize it’s full potential unless you plan for disaster, different failure scenarios layout your storage accordingly. Data protection, various replication technologies are as well as network components private and public are explained early on so you get all the essentials for building a bullet proof environment at every component level. There are also concrete examples for some of these components or tasks like adding a third site mediator to a set or in the networking discussion you will learn about vlan tagging. Replication technologies is a big topic and would deserve a book of it’s own. You will find enough information in this book to understand where your cluster environment benefit from it and what technologies to consider for various protection requirements. Campus and metro clusters are also explained. I particularly liked where Tim is discussing latency limits which is very important when long distance of separation of nodes and/or storage is used.

Quorum concepts are clearly explained as well as how cluster is protecting data residing on shared devices. There are a great number of file systems used in Solaris Cluster. Which one to use and for what, pros and cons for each are nicely explained. Cluster file system aka. pxfs or proxy filesystem that allows multiple nodes accessing the same data. Tim will share with you some of the best practices on taking advantage of this feature.

Networking is a vital component for clusters. Solaris Cluster has some advanced components to present a single IP address to users and have multiple nodes behind running multiple instances of a service behind that single address. There are a lot of configuration options and Tim does an excellent job leading you through the maze and understand it so you can make the right choice for your application.

You can not provide a service without providing security measures as well. Throughout the books security is explained whenever a technology component is discussed. I was happy to find a dedicated chapter on cluster hardening.

You will also get some discussion and advice on backing up or upgrading your cluster, disaster recovery just to name a few.

Oh boy, and here comes virtualization. We are living in the age where virtualization is a reality and you will run into it and use it whether you just got out of college or one of the old school unix veterans. You can virtualize everything in the today’s computing environment. Starting at simple things like creating multiple domains at the hardware levels or Solaris zones at the software level. Virtual network, virtual storage, virtual servers and integrate cluster on top of this running a service that is very real to the end user. This sounds slick and it is but there is a very large complexity under the covers that makes these slick concepts work seamlessly. There is a whole chapter dedicated to explain what these are and when to use them what is their advantage etc. You will also get a feel for some of the issues that may arrive for example how would you patch an environment built from virtual components.

After you learned all the underlying technologies, building blocks you will get some very practical guide to manage your cluster and services. Starting with installation basics like root disk requirements various files systems and mirroring choices etc to jumpstart, live upgrade and more. Quick intro to command line interface or use of GUI and again security mentioned wherever you need it. System monitoring once it is running.
There are also simple command line examples to integrate your services into Solaris Cluster, you will even see a database installation and how to put the database under cluster control. Tim even gives you tips on how test drive Solaris Cluster with limited resources on hand using Oracle Virtual Box. There is a dedicated chapter to geographic clusters. This is for those who not only want to provide higher availability to services but also want to have service continuity when disaster hits.

If you are an e-reader the kindle addition saves you some money over paperback and lets you follow the links to various references within the book or on the net.

Excellent in condition!

At first glance one would think that this text was an extended introduction to the concepts of clusters as well as considerable discussion about interesting limits in latency and communcation speeds in inter-cluster connections. It completely lacks any real “essentials” that would aid the reader in the creation of a cluster, the administration or even something as “essential” as the cluster storage that is needed. This book may look like it provides the essential but it simply fails utterly in this respect. Does it provide information? Yes. If you would like to read about some of the things that were done at Sun Labs to make this happen and perhaps have long reads about the various ways that you *could* create a cluster then fine. However, don’t buy this book thinking that there are any essentials. There are not. It does not even talk about simple things like the patches you need for Sun Cluster 3.2 on your Solaris 10 10/09 install.