No more waits for echoes, Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 2.0.6 was released

Oracle had release the EECS 2.0.6, the main new functionality is OVAB 11.1.1.6.2 that is now available, but for some of our customers other new functionality are more interesting, below the list of new features extracted from the Oracle® Exalogic Elastic Cloud Release Notes Release EL X2-2 and EL X3-2 Part Number E18480-11.


1.1 New Features and Enhancements in EECS 2.0.6

    1.1.1 Deploying Assemblies in the Exalogic vDC Using OVAB Deployer
Totally new feature that comes to help the "industrialization" of Exalogic deployment, together with the new Weblogic 12.1.2 dynamic clusters allows to scale any Weblogic deployed application without service interruption. Using together with OVM based development environments makes possible to evolve or retrofit keeping the architectural patterns and templates. 

    1.1.2 Support for Hybrid Configurations
This ability to have partial visualized partial physical Exalogic is for me an "echo" for a customer question that have some software suppliers that do not support the current version of the embedded OVM in Exalogic, but want to use OFM with all the scaling (OVAB or not) functionality of virtualization. The most important part is the ability to convert later between physical to virtual and from virtual to physical. Really a very useful new functionality.

    1.1.3 Fewer VMs for the Exalogic Control Stack
The five vServers used by EECS 2.0.4 consumes really a good number os CPUS and RAM, when using inside on 1/4 or bigger Exalogic this does not represent a big deal, but when using inside an 1/8 Exalogic (with 4 X3-2 computing nodes) it makes difference. One really interesting note in the document: "Note that, in EECS 2.0.6, the Exalogic Control VMs are distributed over fewer compute nodes: two nodes in the case of a fresh EECS 2.0.6 installation, and three nodes if you upgrade from EECS 2.0.4 to 2.0.6. "

    1.1.4 LVM-Based Disk Partitioning on Guest vServers
In our vServer creation procedures we define a dis size considering the swap and log (for Linux kernel) inside vServer disk, this helps to manage in a more efficient way the internal disk configuration for vServers, I saw a very good from Oracle team in one customer doing the conversion from one disk with two partitions (/ and swap) to a very well defined LVM structure using the EECS 2.0.4 template. My approach is to keep as closer to the original template as possible to avoid surprises when upgrading, this means avoid installing rpms inside the vServer internal disk and use NFS (ZFS) volumes for everything (also for rotating internal Linux kernel logs) and never count with the swap for memory (we should ever consider the the vServers disk are over and NFS volume). 

    1.1.5 Exabus/IMB 1.1 and Exalogic Java 1.1.6

    1.1.6 Configuring DNS for EoIB Networks
Highly demanded, network name resolution inside Exalogic in previous versions  is by himself, we need to use /etc/hosts files (and the scale of the environment is tricky) or use public DNS servers (force name service resolution for not visible networks) both sounds a little bit strange for me. Now is possible to define one DNS server per network (Oracle® Exalogic Elastic Cloud Administrator's Guide Release EL X2-2 and X3-2 Part Number E25258-07)

    1.1.7 OSWatcher Included in the Base Image and Guest Template
Very useful tool, but uses internal disk for data storage(/opt/oswbb), now with LVM is more easy to manage. 

    1.1.8 imagehistory and imageinfo Commands Included in the Base Template


    1.1.9 Linux Server-Based Exalogic Guest Base Template
After configuring some vServer we realized that those Linux vServers was configured as desktop and run in runlevel 5 (with graphical interface), using the Exalogic philosophy, we created templates with everything that we need and running in runlevel 3. The new template is more aligned with the expected usage inside Exalogic. 

    1.1.10 Detailed View of Resource-Allocation by Account
Nice to have in the console more information about the accounts, personally I prefer IAAS CLI to manage the resources 

Some new things that are not in the release notes:

As per note The Command "Iaas-create-distribution-group" Does Not Allow To Define Number Of Elements (Doc ID 1569851.1) in MOS, the command iaas-create-distribution-group does not accept the already documented parameter size, the new IAAS CLI is available and now the parameter is there:

[exalogic@oel-exa-admin ~]$ iaas-create-distribution-group
Required option '--name' is missing (120029)
USAGE:
   Create a new distribution group.
 
   iaas-create-distribution-group|iaas-cdg  [--access-key-file <access-key-file>
                                            ] [--base-url <base_url>] [--debug]
                                            [--desc <descr>] [--header] [--help]
                                            --name <name> [--sep <separator>]
                                            [--size <size>]
                                            [--trust-store <truststore_file>]
                                            [--verbose] [--xml]
   Options:
 
   --access-key-file|-a <access-key-file>  Path to the access key file.
   --base-url <base_url>                   Base URL of the Oracle Enterprise
                                           Manager Ops Center vServer secure url
                                           (https://<ochost>).
   --debug|-D                              Start the command in debug mode.
   --desc|-d <descr>                       An (optional) description.
   --header|-H                             Output a header row (default no
                                           header).
   --help|-h                               Print this usage message.
   --name|-n <name>                        Name of the resource.
   --sep <separator>                       The column separator character(s),
                                           default TAB.
   --size|-s <size>                        size of the distribution group
                                           (default size is 50000).
   --trust-store <truststore_file>         Path to the file containing the
                                           trusted SSL certificates (default
                                           $HOME/.oracle_iaas/truststore).
   --verbose|-v                            Produce verbose output (for
                                           debugging).
   --xml                                   Output result in XML format (default
                                           table format).
Note: All commands are executed remotely as the specified or AccessKey user
      The for-user option may be used to execute on behalf of another user

There one thing that we are still waiting for:

1. Cross account networking over infiniband: in one project we thinked about having one account with common things (OTD, OSB or both for example) and those common things being able to forward requests to components in other accounts, but doing this over IB. Until EECS 2.0.4 (and I will check 2.0.6 in more detail) is not possible to do something like that. 

So, very good news from the echo I hope everyone can enjoy the powerful of the new Exalogic  Elastic Cloud Software 2.0.6.

P.S. (in 20.09.2013):

2. Today is not possible to change any configuration from an vServer without recreating the entire machine, this is related with the way that the vServer network interfaces over the xenbridge are created and cataloged over the two  catalogs (OVM and EMOC) and also over the vServer configurations file. My wish is to only CPU and RAM (that do not change complex xenbridge over infiniband partitions configurations) can be changed without recreating the entire machines.

P.S. (in 01.10.2013):
  
In EECS 2.0.6 Oracle VM Manager will be upgraded to v3.2.1, more functionality to colect information from OVM WS interface. For customers that want to run SAP inside a virtualized Exalogic now is possible.