Recent Posts by Eric Sharakan

LDoms 1.0 was released in April 2007. Hard to believe it's been almost 10 years! It's been an amazing ride, and it's far from over! We just released 3.4.0.3, the latest maintenance update to 3.4. And there's more to come. Read about the anniversary, and the latest update in Honglin's blog.

We're thrilled to announce the release of LDoms 3.4 (officially Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.4), which has been delivered as part of Oracle Solaris 11.3 SRU 8.7. Together, they provide new features for virtualization, performance, security, scalability, and system management. Rather than repeating what others have said, I'll just direct you to these two blog entries here and here.

A couple quick updates since I last posted here: LDoms 3.2 has been released. You can read all about it in Jeff Savit's blog entry. Speaking of Jeff, he was instrumental in the publication of a White Paper entitled "Oracle VM Server for SPARC Best Practices". Topics covered include: • Oracle VM Server for SPARC definitions, concepts and deployment options • Software, hardware, and firmware requirements • Best Practices for optimal performance• Best Practices for resiliency...

Yes, you read that right, 3.1.1.1. Despite the numbering, there are a few important new features in this version. A summary is available in Oracle's Virtualization Blog, with more details in this OTN entry.

Oracle VM Server for SPARC (aka LDoms) 3.1 is now available. You can read all about it over at the Virtualization Blog. I want to focus on the enhancements we've made to cross-CPU migration. Cross-CPU migration is the ability to migrate a running virtual machine (VM) from a SPARC server with one type of CPU chip to another of a different type. Prior to LDoms 3.1, the only way to perform such a migration was to specify a "cpu-arch" property of "generic" when first defining...

I'll be at Oracle Open World 2012 next week in San Francisco. I'm presenting in a session entitled "What’s New with Oracle VM Server for x86 and SPARC Architectures: A Technical Deep Dive", along with Adam Hawley. We'll be talking about Oracle's overall virtualization strategy, what's new with Oracle server virtualization on both x86 and SPARC, as well as an update on Oracle's virtualization management capabilities. The session runs from 11:45am to 12:45pm on Wednesday 10/3,...

We've just released Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.2! This release contains some major new features, along with numerous other improvements and (of course) bug fixes. I'll only briefly highlight the key new features here; visit Oracle's Virtualization Blog for more information on this release, including where to download the software, getting access the documentation, and providing pointers to blogs describing other features in the release. In this post, I'm going to focus on...

As mentioned in my last entry, we've made some specific enhancements to Oracle VM Server for SPARC for the T4 family of systems. One of these enhancements is the addition of dynamic CPU threading controls. These controls leverage the dynamic threading feature of the T4 processor to further optimize the single-threaded performance for CPU-bound workloads. This is accomplished by limiting the number of active threads per core, allowing more of the hardware resources of the core...

Today we announced the all-new SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 engineered system. We're excited about all the new SPARC T4 Processor based systems, with the new core design of the T4 delivering much better single-thread performance than any other processor in the family. But the incredible performance characteristics of the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 in particular are made possible through enhancements up & down the hardware & software stacks. This extends to virtualization of course....