Disaster Recovery, Solaris and Inside Man…

 

I’ve just started another disaster recovery test week. I’ve got to install/recover the whole of the production environment, including 10g RAC in Tru64, Cold-Failover Cluster Infratructure on Linux and Application Servers. As a result, might get a little quiet over the next week…

As well as testing some FC5 stuff, see previous post, I installed Solaris 10 on x86-32 at the weekend. It was pretty straight forward, but it took forever to complete. I ended up leaving it over night. I don’t know if this was because it’s just slow, or whether it was an issue with VMware Server. Once it had finished I started thinking about an Oracle installation, then I noticed that 10g is not available for Solaris 10 on x86-32, just x86-64. Bummer! I might end up writing a Solaris operating system installation document, just so I don’t feel like I’ve wasted the time πŸ™‚

On Saturday night I went to see The Inside Man. I thought it was a cool film, but it’s one of those films that twists and turns constantly. If you like heist films, then you’ll probably dig it, but avoid reading any reviews that mention content, because it would be really easy to ruin the film…

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

9 thoughts on “Disaster Recovery, Solaris and Inside Man…”

  1. Cool:-).Yes when I bought Solaris 10 and tried to install the first time,it took soooo long.The o/s alone takes around 3+gb of hdd space.Waiting for your article.Will you cover text installation of solaris 10 too sir?
    regards
    Aman Sharma

  2. Hi.

    I only did the default interactive installation. I don’t know if I can bring myself to run a text install. I only have one life πŸ™‚

    Cheers

    Tim…

  3. “I installed Solaris 10 on x86-32 at the weekend. It was pretty straight forward, but it took forever to complete. I ended up leaving it over night. I don’t know if this was because it’s just slow, or whether it was an issue with VMware Server. Once it had finished I started thinking about an Oracle installation, then I noticed that 10g is not available for Solaris 10 on x86-32, just x86-64. Bummer! I might end up writing a Solaris operating system installation document, just so I don’t feel like I’ve wasted the time πŸ™‚ ”

    I didn’t find it that slow – maybe a little bit longer than Centos 4.2. Maybe you need 4 CPUs πŸ˜‰

    I wish you’d noticed the blog I did about this because that’s why I had to junk Solaris 10 (for now). Having said that, you wouldn’t expect the 32-bit version to be long behind the 64.

  4. Doug: The sad thing is I did read your post, but I got caught up in the moment and forgot about it, because I’m a total idiot. That’ll teach me πŸ™‚

    Cheers

    Tim…

  5. Hi sir
    This is about the disaster recovery scenerio that you just mentioned.I am not in that position where I can say that I am a true professinal.I say myself a nnewbie only.Take it as a request of mine.Would you publish a artcile/paper something for the freshers like me to have a look/feel about these kind of scenerios.I know its really impossible to learn anything like without actually being into that environment but I am sure it will be really helpful to get atleast a little idea.If you dont think that its a feasible/valid request than accept my apology.
    best regards
    Aman

  6. Hi.

    Pretend you’ve lost your production system and try to recreate it on new kit without referring to the current production system.

    We’re at a different site with a bunch of rented kit and our backup tapes. If you can do it you’re disaster recovery plan is OK. If you can’t you need to do some more work.

    This is thr second time we’ve done it and it’s alot better this time, but we’ve identified some new issues we would have never seen without doing this.

    Disaster recovery is a must, but it’s expensive and time consuming. We have our wholee department away from the office!

    Cheers

    Tim…

  7. Tim:

    VMWare Server is an attrocious heap of poo, frankly. Well, Beta 1 was, and I haven’t yet tested their Beta 2.

    It is wonderful that it is free, and full marks to Vmware for doing that… but a Windows XP installation on it took over an hour to get about 75% of the way through before I gave up, trashed the XP installation, and uninstalled VMware Server. I then re-installed VMware Workstation, and said XP installation completed in about 25 minutes. On the same host, I hasten to add.

    Thinking I might have just been unlucky, I had another go with Centos & Vmware Server on a client’s PC… same story. I’ve done enough Centos installs to know how they should go and ‘feel’, and this one felt like walking through treacle on a cold day in gumboots.

    My own Solaris install onto VMware Workstation took the best part of two hours, I think. Difficult to tell… it’s such a long-winded affair on the best hardware that you can’t help but go for walks and cups of tea in between things, so you inevitably end up missing out on clicking buttons as soon as you should. So the overall time gets inflated a bit with tea-induced slackness. But anyway… point is, if it’s 2 hours on a VMware Workstation box, it wouldn’t surprise me that it would be more like 4 or 6 on a VMware Server one!

    When VM Server comes out of Beta, I shall embrace it with open arms. But not yet.

  8. Howard:

    The second beta is a lot better. I’ve had no trouble with XP or CentOS as VMs, but Solaris (listed as experimental) was very slow, and FC5 is a pain.

    One nice thing is you can open Workstation 5(.5) VMs in the Server version, so you don’t have to reinstall existing VMs.

    I keep meaning to try Xen, but I’ve not got round to it yet…

    Cheers

    Tim…

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