06.24.08
Redhat Summit summary
The Redhat Summit was a success for me. I got a lot of useful information from the presentations I attended, especially the “Performance tuning Jboss Enterprise Application Platform” session given by Andy Miller. Andy talked about tuning many of the pools in Jboss, like the thread pool and database connection pools. The juiciest piece of info was running Jboss with HugeTLB. We’re going to hit that one hard in terms of testing, validating and deploying in our production environments.
The “Optimizing the SOA Enterprise: Using Jboss and Redhat Enterprise Linux virtualization” session, given by Isaac Christofersen of Booz Allen Hamilton, was also very interesting. The built a cluster of Xen VMs, then build a cluster of Jboss instances in it. They used GFS on top of iSCSI LUNs for shared mounts. This got them away from HBA cards and deploying a separate SAN fabric. The trickiest part they encountered was setting up VLANs on the VM bridges. They had to modify a script or two to get it to work correctly. The benefit they got was being able to provision a Jboss app server in minutes on a VM infrastructure. Everything was highly available (a cluster in a cluster) and they actually realized greater performance then Jboss app servers sitting on real hardware.
The “What’s the fuss about fastboot and the new kernel crash dumping?” session, given by Vivek Goyal of Redhat, was another very interesting session. It talked about kdump and kexec, booting another kernel without rebooting the hardware and more. The ability to jump from one kernel into another (kexec) provides some really good benefits. kdump is built on kexec and provides a great framework for kernel developers and dealing with some really tricky kernel crashes. If you have unexplained kernel crashe, look into this as it stands to provide more and better information for resolving issues.
Finally, the “Augeas: A Linux configuration API” session, given by David Lutterkort of Redhat, was good. Augeas will fill a hole in Linux nicely, if they can come up a way to effectively manage “complex” configuration files, like DHCP, Apache and any XML-formatted file. Augeas uses regular language to pick apart and piece back together a config file and those mentioned do not lend themselves to simple regular expressions.
I went to other sessions but they were either a wash (mostly things I already knew but was deceived by a poorly written description) or a dog & pony show trying to sell me products/services.
Other highlights of the Summit:
- IBM sponsored Wednesday night’s dinner at Fenway Park. Fenway is a great baseball stadium. I got some grainy photos on my cell phone and sat on the Green Monster.
- Redhat provided lunch during the conference, which meant I could spend more on dinner.
- Schwag I got: a Redhat backpack, a baseball with Redhat and IBM’s logo on it, a plushTux penguin from Trusted Computer Systems, Inc., a tee shirt from QLogic, a foam Tux penguin rom R1Soft, a 1 GB USB drive from the Fedora Project, a cheesy monitor duster from BakBone Software
- The seafood in Boston is great. I had several varieties from chowder, which were all better than anythig you’ll get from a can. Oyster bars rule! Free wifi rules over $10.95/day hotel wired connections (always use a VPN for any network connections, regardless.)
