Anil Gulecha's Musings

I’ve been neglecting my blogging duties, but I’m back on track. Lots of things have happened in the recent times, but the big news today is the release of the Nexenta Core Platform 2. This release has been a year in the making, and took a lot of hard work.

We’ve also produced a short comic, with our very own hero, Nexentaman, to walk you through NCP. Click below to read the comic.

The Adventures of Nexentaman

Links

Nexenta homepage: http://www.nexenta.org

Artwork and Wallpapers: http://www.nexenta.org/os/SpreadTheWord

IRC : #nexenta on freenode

Go ahead, test drive Nexenta, and spread the word

Oracle has aquired Sun.

There were weeks of speculation of a buyout by IBM, which generated loads of discussions on the opensolaris forums. The biggest fear was IBM buying Sun, and killing off competing products. Sun and IBM competed on many fronts.. Opensolaris vs AIX, Eclipse vs Netbeans, Mysql vs DB2, Power vs Sparc, etc.. not to mention the server hardware market.

Sun’s price-tag was nothing to IBM.. it could’ve bought Sun out with a week’s revenues. The talks fail, Oracle swoops in, and grabs Sun. A /. comment sums it up..

[I've made a few small updates correcting typos and inserted additional information to turn off any existing shareiscsi=on zfs volumes]

Opensolaris has had the capability to share an iscsi target for sometime. This was done in the userland via the iscsi target daemon.

The COMSTAR project on opensolaris was started to build a fast scsi target on the platform. From the project page:

COMSTAR is a software framework that enables you to turn any OpenSolaris host into a SCSI target that can be accessed over the network by initiator hosts. COMSTAR breaks down the huge task of handling a SCSI target subsystem into independent functional modules. These modules are then glued together by the SCSI Target Mode Framework (STMF).

COMSTAR provides

• Extensive LUN Masking and mapping functions
• Multipathing across different transport protocols
• Multiple parallel transfers per SCSI command
• Scalable design
• Compatible with generic HBAs

With intergration of COMSTAR to ZFS, Nexenta Core Platform provides for very easy setup as an iSCSI target. These latest changes to ZFS are available both in the latest beta2 release of NCP, as well as the commercial NexentaStor v1.1.5.

How to setup a NCP2 box as an iSCSI target

First, shutdown older iSCSI target service, and start the new one

svcadm disable -s iscsitgt
svccfg delete -f iscsitgt

Also if you have any zfs volumes with shareiscsi=on, set them to shareiscsi=off. This is required to setup the new zfs integrated scsi correctly.

Enable iscsi/target and it’s dependency

svcadm enable -s stmf
svcadm enable -s iscsi/target

Install the switch by creating the file:

touch /etc/shareiscsi.conf

Now create a dataset (volume) which is to be shared via iSCSI

zfs create -V 500m tank/zvol1

Using -V creates a volume type dataset, and it reserves the given amount of space on the pool for it’s data. In our case we reserved 500 Mb of space for our volume zol1. To create an SCSI target using this, simply run.

zfs set shareiscsi=on tank/zvol1

And we’re now set . To confirm that the target has been configured, check that output of

itadm list-target -v

Performance gain

This implementation of an iSCSI target provides 2-3 times the performance of the older userland implementation in opensolaris. The numbers stack up as follows:

Parameters:  4 workers x 8 outstanding IOs

COMSTAR iSCSI target

50000 IOPS, 512B, 97% CPU, 24MB/sec  <- Reads
40000 IOPS, 512B, 92% CPU, 17MB/sec  <-Writes

OLD UserLand iSCSI target

17000 IOPS, 512B, 98% CPU, 8MB/sec  <- Reads
15000 IOPS, 512B, 98% CPU, 7.5MB/sec  <-Writes

The tests were conducted with IOMeter, using a 100M zvol with zil disabled. Also these were done over a 1G network between the target and the initiator.

More information on COMSTAR can be found on it’s project page, and the changes can be found in the nexenta-on package in NCP2.

“NCP2 will be released in 1 month so file your bugs, make your additions and voice your opinion now or forever hold your peace!”

The blueprint you need to keep track of NCP2 release is up at launchpad titled “hardy release”.

So there. You have been informed.. if there was a particular bug, or change for NCP you had in mind, let us know! We’re so interested, we’ve created the following ways for you to let us know:

IRC : #nexenta on freenode

Mailing list : gnusol-devel

Launchpad bugs : File a bug..

There are a bunch of things to be done, so your help with development and polishing of NCP2 is welcome and appriciated.

Debtorrent on Nexenta

Find your packages downloading slow on Nexenta? Debtorrent is a technology that brings bittorrent to apt packaging system. We’ve added support for debtorrent on nexenta.org, so you can now seed packages you download for others.. this makes download faster for users living near you.

Setting up

To setup debtorrent, simply run

apt-get install debtorrent

Now tha you have debtorrent running (by default on port 9988, add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.lst

deb debtorrent://localhost:9988/apt.nexenta.org hardy-unstable main contrib non-free
deb-src debtorrent://localhost:9988/apt.nexenta.org hardy-unstable main contrib non-free

Debtorrent is intelligent enough to fallback to normal http mode if debtorrent doesnt work (or there is no one seeding the required package)

Advanced configuration

Debtorrent works great in a LAN environment. So one PC would use the above configuration, and the rest would connect to this single one.

Instructions

Full instructions for setting up can be found on our debtorrent page.

To learn more about debtorrent, visit its homepage.

The third edition of the Nexenta Hackathon starts today.

We’ve made incredible progress over the past two months, and the community activities have increased. The IRC channel audience has grown considerably. Starting today, we’ll be working on some of the final tasks, before we release NCP2, the final version.

Bounty

This hackathon also features a bounty for various tasks, sponsored by Nexenta Systems. There are small awards for some of the high priority tasks, including porting efforts, documentation, and creating Nexenta spinoffs.

The task list from the announcement.

Package porting:  Most of the packages in the repository are now automatically built. There are a few crucial packages that need to be built manually, and allow the builder to pick up on the rest.

Documentaiton: Not everyone knows how easy some tasks are on Nexenta. Help us write documentation, so new users find migrating much easier.

Distributions: NCP has now evolved to a tested core platform. Use the existing packages and window managers in the repository to build your own distribution using our distribution builder; tune Nexenta for a particular appliance and help us enhance our installer.

Significant contributions will be featured on the Nexenta project Homepage.

Further Information: http://www.nexenta.org/os/Hackathon
IRC web interface: http://www.nexenta.org/chat
Autobuilder: http://builder.tajinc.org/?f=repository_status

I mentioned in a previous post that GUI related packages were being populated into the NCP2 repository. Since pictures are a thousand words:

Gnome, GIMP and Irssi running on NCP2 (not to mention the Heron)

Huge thanks to dtbartle, who has actively been porting Gnome into the package repository. Why not hop into #nexenta and say thanks.

Theres also other window managers being populated at the moment. Small ones like Enlightenment (e16) and 9wm are fully in.

PS: Also another round of hackthon is in the plans. Stay tuned for more.

The last time I mentioned the Nexenta autobuilder, it was just opened and not fully completed. That changed recently.

The autobuilder is now in the works and since the beinning of the week has been chugging away tirelessly, working on Ubuntu Hardy’s 8.04 repository. The result.. over 2500 packages now reside in Nexenta’s contrib repsoitory. Going at this rate, we should have triple this amount by the end of next week.

The autobuilder is built to scale, and all of the work is shared between 2 nodes. The pace of package porting will increase with more packages. Do you have a machine free for the autobuilder to use (and have the bandwidth to spare)? Drop in on #nexenta or the devel mailing list, and we’ll help you setup. Look for Tim Spriggs (aka rootard). We’re still a good while away from Ubuntu’s 20000 packages.

The autobuilder will however not work for packages that need to be ported to Opensolaris/Nexenta. These should be few and far in between. It does fishily sound like another hackathon.

The first beta release of NCP2 was released yesterday. This release was bug fix release with a big leap in the opensolaris build (from the previous b85+ to b104+).

Also, most of the common server applications now have SMF support. The latest version of devzones is also included. For the full announcement and release highlights, see here.

* OpenSolaris build 104+ based with critical patches.
* Over 6000 packages in the repository, and autobuilder.
* Based on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) repository
* This includes latest dpkg/apt, gcc, binutils, coreutils,
perl, python, ruby, Qt libs, GTK libs, etc
* SMF support added for server applications like apache, mysql, postgresql, exim4, etc.
* 100% native Debian environment, easy to upgrade, easy to use
* Includes Vim and screen by default
* Addition of latest devzone version to the CD.
* Includes apt-clone which brings zfs power to apt-get.

So get your copy hot off the presses now. Links below

Nexenta: http://www.nexenta.org

Beta Download: nexenta-core-platform_2.0-b104-beta1_x86.iso.zip

For comments/solutions and queries goto the #nexenta IRC room at freenode.

Devzone

If you’ve kept track of the latest in the Nexenta community, or logged into our build machines, you’ll know about a neat little set of utilities we have built on top of Opensolaris Zones. Devzones are a simple concept which allow you to create a custom zone, and creating multiple copies for developers.

Devzone

The devzone package is now available online from sourceforge under the GPL2 license.

We’ve been adding new features to make administration simple. Devzones will be built into the upcoming NCP2 Beta release.

Meanwhile you can take a look at what’s cooking in the background at the below address, or checkout the latest from SVN

Project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/devzone/

SVN: svn co https://devzone.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/devzone devzone

AutoBuilder

The autobuilder project too has been hosted on sourceforge. This is a distributed way to build those humongous apt repositories for your Ubuntu sized distro.

Client nodes can request for packages to build. This is almost fully complete and is already functional as a web based view of debain apt repositories. Give it a try at http://builder.tajinc.org/

Project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/autobuilder/

SVN: svn co https://autobuilder.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/autobuilder autobuilder

I’m working on a simple tutorial for devzones, and it should be published shortly.. so stay tuned for that. Meanwhile, spread the word.

Thank Tim Spriggs(rootard) for these tools. If you have any questions, or want to participate, join our IRC channel at #nexenta@freenode (there’s a web based interface here).