Another packed day in San Francisco, I had to visit 3 different places to assist sessions I have planned today.
I have not enough time to write about everything, so what’s the program?

A few words about the keynote on Big Data, some cool news concerning VirtualBox and also Linux management.

Big Data

Mark Hurd, President of Oracle, started the conference with a video on Oracle Team USA and asks the public to motivate the team. As you probably know, the team is still defending its title in the sailing race America’s Cup. And by the way, it seems it have worked, Oracle team USA won today and now the score is 8-6. New races will take place tomorrow.

Let’s talk about Big Data, with engineered system it’s a big topic this year. By now, the number of sensor is growing, everything is connected to Internet and is getting social, companies need to keep an eye on customers feelings and needs. So data is constantly growing and we have not only to handle that volume of data but also to extract useful data to keep and improve the business.

The strategy of Oracle hasn’t change since last year, Oracle can provide the full stack for the infrastructure from storage to the application including middleware and server. Oracle designed appliances specifically to answer to the need of performance to analyze Big Data.

One important thing I’ve noticed is that Oracle is able to extract data from NoSQL Oracle Database but also from Hadoop. Some connectors are available and you can use R or directly SQL to filter data from “key, value” structured data.

Several Oracle’s customers talked live or in video about big data and how the usage of Oracle engineered systems helped them to get valuable data for their business.

One example of Airbus was about test flights, now they’re able to analyze all data from all sensors in a more efficient way to reduce delays between test flights and improve the quality of their planes.
They’re also able to handle data about planes from airlines companies and it represents a huge amount of data.

News about VirtualBox

I’m using that product for a while to test a lot of stuff on my personal laptop. It’s easy to create and destroy a virtual machine and keep my own O.S clean.

Andy Hall, Director of Product Management at Oracle, introduced the new version 4.3 of VirtualBox, which is coming with some new features and improvements: new platforms, network enhancements and new utilities.

About the platforms, it will support as expected Windows 8.1 and Windows 2012, Mac OS X 10.9 and also mobile O.S like the latest Android version. And for Windows 8.1, VirtualBox has now the ability to simulate a 10 points multi-touch device.

The network is the most important part I think. Before, it was not possible to have several virtual machines on the same network using NAT card. Because each virtual machine had its own NAT and all virtual machines had the same IP.

VirtualBox introduces a new NAT network type we can create to put several virtual machines on the same LAN. If you need to have several machines on the same network that need to access Internet or to be accessed (through port forwarding) you don’t need anymore to create manually a route or to put every machine on the physical network with bridged network.

But unfortunately, I will still require a host only network to access the machines from the host without creating port forwarding for each one.
Oh and it’s also IPv6 ready.

One of the most important feature that I may use in the future, it’s the screen recording feature.
VirtualBox allows the capture of one or several screens of the virtual machine and records in a WebMD video file on the host disk.
It will help creating videos for future demos.

Lunchbreak

I’ve no idea about the weather at home but here it’s sunny and if it’s a bit cold in the morning it gets better during the day. So I’ve been able to enjoy short lunchtime outside in listening music. Yes it’s very nice.

Oracle Linux Management

Avi Miller, Principal Program Manager at Oracle and Timothy Hill, Senior Developer at Oracle have discussed several topics here.

Avi started on the management side, Enterprise Manager 12c can be used on Oracle Linux servers for administration, monitoring, patching and provisioning. And it has to be said, if you have support (even with basic), it’s free of charge. Oracle is still providing for free the public Yum repository also to distribute security patches and bug fixes. Moreover in 2013, Oracle also provides access to yum errata metadata to allow searching and filtering by CVE for example.

But what I really would like to test is the imaging feature. We can select a system in Enterprise Manager as a reference system. OEM will gather all useful information from that system and then create an image.
Next we just simply boot on network with PxE and OEM will be able to deploy that image on the new machine.
And there is more, if a patch is available, it will be applied on live systems that require it. But the image will also be update so the future deployment will be up to date.

Regarding management, Oracle Linux is fully compatible with Spacewalk for managing, patching and provisioning.

Then Timothy made a short presentation of Ksplice. Ksplice allows patching and updating the kernel without downtime. It supports UEK and Red Hat compatible kernel as well. In fact, the kernel on disk isn’t touched and all updates reside in memory. It’s only a command to apply or revert a patch.

In a live demonstration, we’ve seen the application of all available patches from February to July in less than 1 minute without reboot.
The feature is available with Premier Support with no extra cost.

In conclusion, they announced that a plugin is ready to get Ksplice information in OEM and any SNMP system and the goal is to be able to run in GUI what we can do in command line. It was another big day in San Francisco! More is coming on next blogs…