I am providing support for Solaris Cluster again and have am now on a Mac (Hacintosh) using Vmware Fusion for my virtualization. Before you proceed with this tutorial, you must first install socat on the Mac as it is used to perform the console I/O redirection. I suggest using homebrew:
brew install socat
I recently had the need to install systemtap on one of my CentOS 7 VMs and the process isn’t as straight forward as it should be. It seems not all packages needed are built for all revisions of the kernel. After much searching, I managed to get this working and wanted to archive this procedure.
I wanted to capture the changes which need to be done to a fresh centos7 server install to support Oracle 12C. The server was installed with Basic Server using a 4GB swap device but before we can start the Oracle install, we need to prepare the system.
I recently had the need to update my shiny new FreeBSD jailed server because I wanted to migrate to WordPress. I didn’t want to bring down the existing server while I did the install and converted my content so I managed to clone my existing jailed server using warden:
warden export name_of_jail --dir=/directory_for_warden_file This will take a while… Once done, you can import the warden file creating a new jail:
warden import jail_warden_file.wdn --host=jailbird --ipv4=192.168.1.105/24 You’ve now got a cloned jail and a template for creating other jailed servers.
A VirtualBox Solaris Cluster complete with shared storage and quorum disk!
The host system is a Mac running 10.8:
Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge 3.5GHz
16Gb RAM
GeForce GTX 470 1280M
At the time of this article, I’m running Mac OSX 10.8.2 with VirtualBox 4.2.6. The Solaris Cluster is 3.3 running in a Solaris 10u10 virtual machine.
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If you’re like me and prefer the command line to the GUI, here’s a trick and script to help you manage your Solaris VMs.
Install socat on the host system
sudo apt-get install socat
Change the eeprom console device for the VM:
eeprom console=ttya
Change the /boot/grub/menu.lst for the VM:
... # To enable grub serial console to ttya uncomment the following lines # and comment out the splashimage line below # WARNING: don't enable grub serial console when BIOS console serial # redirection is active!!! serial --unit=0 --speed=9600 terminal serial # # Uncomment the following line to enable GRUB splashimage on console #splashimage /boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz # # To chainload another OS ...
Bring down the VM:
init 5
Once this is done, we can now tell VirtualBox to boot the VM headless and connect with socat
VBoxManage startvm node1 --type headless && socat -,raw,echo=0 /tmp/vb-node1-console
I wrote a perl script to handle booting and connecting the console. Feel free to download: vb.pl
$ vb.pl -h
usage:
vb.pl -l
vb.pl -n VM -b
vb.pl -n VM -p
vb.pl -h
-l : list VirtualBox machines
-n : name of the VirtualBox machine
-b : power on and boot machine
-p : power off machine
-h : this message.
Get a list of drives first
VBoxManage list hdds
Clone the desired drive using the UUID:
VBoxManage clonehd 3ce7cfe9-845d-4358-9120-7a46390bcf8c ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/newname