Hi List,
I am seeking advice as to the feasibility of a project I'm working on:
Background:
My sysadmin group supports a satellite missions ops center that relies on
software which only works on Solaris SPARC systems. The ops center currently
has 22 Sunblade 1500's, one for each satellite used for data acquisition and
commanding. The overall system is networked such that we have central name
service, and storage, yet the actual workstations are used to control missions
and acquire data. My plan is to replace each of these workstations with
Solaris 10 branded containers, running on two T5120's setup in an HA
configuration. Each container would use a Sunray as it's head for the
satellite operators. There are many advantages to this setup, but it is
critical that the containers reside in an HA environment.
What I would love to do is use Open HA to build the cluster, using the hardware
minimized setup, so we don't need separate quorum hardware. We have limited
funds. We already own the T5120's and some Sunrays, but don't have the cash for
expensive shared storage and controllers. As it stands right now, we can't
really build out a test environment, because the Solaris 10 branded zones don't
work on snv_111b, and as I understand it, the current Open HA release won't
work on the newer builds. So my hope is that there will be an Open HA release
coincident with Opensolaris 2010.02. I also hope there will be a Solaris 10
branded zone that is compatible in 2010.02. Is this a reasonable expectation?
Of course, there are other problems with this setup:
System recovery scenarios: Since there's no boot CD for SPARC, recovering a
system could be tricky. We will need a boot server within our operations
center to recover these systems of they completely die. OTOH, hopefully there
will be a SPARC boot CD for 2010.02.
System updates: These will need to be applied with extreme care, since we
don't want to break the cluster. Unlike the current setup, all of our eggs
will be in one basket on the Sunray/zone servers.
What am I not thinking about?
Thanks in advance for any thoughts/recommendations on this.
Jon
- _____/ _____/ / - Jonathan Loran - -
- / / / IT Manager -
- _____ / _____ / / Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley
- / / / (510) 643-5146 jloran at ssl.berkeley.edu
- ______/ ______/ ______/ AST:7731^29u18e3
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