WWDC2003 Session 621

Transcript

Kind: captions
Language: en
good afternoon so my name's Doug Brooks
I'm a product manager for server
hardware at Apple and I'd like to talk
to you a little bit today about the
point xserve so you know xserve has had
an exciting year the product is just a
little over one year old we've had a
major update to the product back in
February and an edition of the compute
node in March and so like to talk to you
a little bit about the deploying xserve
so before we dive right into X or would
like to position a little bit about how
extra face and a broader IT sent and it
what's interesting is you know since
we've launched the xserve and actually
in our customer research before we
launched extra we had an opportunity to
talk to a wide range of customers and
really help understand what some of
their challenges are deploying servers
and there were a lot of constant themes
that we were shared with us and you know
things like operational costs
continually under review I mean the old
story of you know doing more with less
or doing a lot more with a little bit
more is a continual challenge
availability of service you know the the
incredible speed and worldwide presence
of the Internet has made time irrelevant
which means that you know opportunities
for downtime are swimming few and in
between so availability of service in a
variety of ways has been continually
challenging and important the point in
time is shorter so time to ramp up
systems and get hardware installed and
networking available and services up and
running is you know medium be done again
and less and less time systems /
administrator increasing and I'm sure
many of you relate to this you're having
more services more servers more physical
boxes being deployed and you need to
manage more and more of those resources
and server utilization is high or having
servers work more do more and they
maintain that utilization rate again
continual challenge so you know the big
question becomes what does Apple has to
offer in this space you know besides
that we think is a pretty neat one you
box and so I think it's important to
understand what you know what we see is
our value proposition in the IT market
and it to address these specific issues
so from a cost perspective we think we
have a great offering from a hardware
and software and software licensing
perspective with low cost of hardware
low cost of storage and a limited client
license is built in and hope you've seen
in some of the other sessions the
ability to you know host more users at a
much lower cost have more storage
available on your network is a big value
that Apple can deliver with our server
products from availability well you know
we design these boxes from the ground up
to be servers and so that means
reliability and availability both in
hardware and software and that's you
know something that we strive with these
products the format time you know X
service design and we'll talk more about
it here to be easy to deploy easy to
manage and be very easy to you know roll
these systems out and so again that is a
key design goal that we build into these
products to provide that and finally
server utilization our goals here to
provide power flexibility at a lower
cost so tremendous amount of services
built in tremendous amount of resources
and the hardware to deliver upon these
requirements so what are we going to
talk about today so quite a number of
things first of all you know I think
it's important to answer you know the Y
xserve question so we'll touch on that
speeds and feeds you know xserve has
been around so we're not going to spend
an incredible amount of time about the
hardware feature set but I think it's
important to provide a high level
architectural review what we really see
are the server value features in xserve
and that we have to offer and of course
then deployment what things can we look
at to make it easy to deploy these boxes
both regarding physical hardware type
issues
software type issues and we'll have a
number of things that will touch on
there and a very important get asked
this a lot is backup strategies so we'll
touch on the latest unavailable backup
strategies for Mac OS 10 and mac OS x
server and finally resources where we
can point you to for more information on
all these topics so let's start with why
xserve so we fundamentally believe that
xserve is the easiest way to deliver
very powerful network services been able
to put a tremendous amount of technology
into a 1u rack mounted server form
factor with you know incredible storage
capability and one of the real
advantages of xserve is the mac OS x
server software having a powerful open
source foundation with very robust
server services or later on top of that
but with fantastic remote management
capabilities very core to the design we
think we've offered you know many of the
same features that people love about
Linux open source great system resources
but integrated all from one one vendor
one place so one-click install gets you
all those features built and ready to go
and again powerful open standards-based
services hopefully you've attended many
of the IT tracks this this week and it's
been a continual theme in open standards
technologies built in best of breed and
finally more capabilities at less cost
really trying to provide a very value
oriented platform with lots of services
and capabilities so quick review of the
hardware so you know xserve again was
designed from the ground up to really be
a phenomenal server platform this is not
a a g4 tower stuck on its side and a
smaller enclosure really optimize this
platform to be a phenomenal server
platform so you know that means a couple
different things so you know first of
all it's a rack-mounted form factor so
being able to sit in industry standard
racks I like to joke it's an industry
standard rack it's not the 20 inch wide
you know Apple special rack industry
standard rac1 you serve that does mean
1.75 inches not to so you know
from industry standard be able to fit
that in with existing network year
existing server gear right in your and
your data center environment we you know
look at the hardware we've packed a
tremendous amount of technology in a
very small amount of space so single and
dual g four processors dual Gigabit
Ethernet each on their own pci interface
for bandwidth and throughput for hot
plug hard drives using a hot plug
architecture that's based on ATA hard
drive which is interesting when we first
launched texture of a lot of people ask
questions about however now you know
because so much in the industry is
beginning to utilize ATA hard drives in
this space not nearly questioned as much
and we think we have a great proposition
with performance and storage capability
with the storage architecture in xserve
and and of course pc i explained ability
to 12 inch pci slots 64-66 delivering
very high performance especially when
connected to external devices like our
own xserve raid really leveraging the
pci performance of becks serve what I
really wanted to highlight though is the
the architecture of X serve because
again this is really optimized you know
to be a server and what that gives us
what it really means is a lot of storage
bandwidth and a lot of networking
bandwidth and so being able to offer
features like dual Gigabit Ethernet
again each on their own pci interface
which gives us the ability to really
keep those channels moving data very
efficiently without them competing for
bandwidth on the system and the storage
architecture again on its own pci bus
very high speed pci bus each hard drive
has its own independent ATA controller
so quad independent ATA controllers what
that gives us is tremendous scalability
as we have storage when we add
additional hard drives to the xserve not
only we adding raw capacity to the
system we're adding more storage
bandwidth in the system so especially
when we look at high bandwidth
applications where we're striking drives
together very strong scalability of
storage in the box and of course the
ability to go external to again to
devices like our extra raid for
additional storage capacity and of
course we put this in a we think is a
real phenomenal rack mounted enclosure
so again designed for ease of access
xserve slides out on Rails okay so that
right within the rack it slides open you
have access to all the key components
everything's on thumbscrews or standoffs
for quick and easy rug repairability any
component can be swapped in roughly a
minute so a very serviceable design we
couple that with unique programs like
our applecare spares parts program where
you can have spare kits right on site so
should you have any component problems
they can be swapped out in sight very
quickly and easily a lot of flexibility
and we'll talk more about the the rack
mounting options that we have with the
xserve the other real key thing that
many people overlook when we first look
at exxaro is you know the dedicated
hardware monitoring that's built into
the system again being a rack mounted
server platform these things are
designed to you know live in a
datacenter live in Iraq you shouldn't
have to as a system administrator you
know spend your time physically in front
of the machine we want to minimize that
as much as possible and that means being
able to provide health and status
information about the server at all time
so we actually have hardware built in on
the logic board of the xserve that is
pulling data about the entire system and
delivering that to our remote management
tools so we're monitoring things like
the voltage is coming off the power
supply of each rail the speed of the
blowers temperature in two different
locations of the box status and
throughput of the ethernet interfaces
status and health of the hard drive
modules matter of fact we're doing
things like reading the smart data off
the hard drives been able to do you look
for performance and health data and look
for what are called pre failure analysis
looking for things that are indicating a
future problems we then wrap that data
all up into our server monitor
management tool which has the ability to
perform email notifications and things
like that so our server monitor tool is
a Coco application that can monitor one
or more exurbs in a single interface you
can see several servers being monitored
he
you have status indicators for all the
key components so you know green lights
are good for all the key components
yellow is a warning condition red is an
error condition and you can drill into
any of those components with one click
to get detailed information if you want
to know the exact temperature of the top
unit in Iraq very easy to do that what's
really interesting about this tool is
that the data hopefully some of you have
the opportunity to go to some of the mac
OS x server sessions where they talked
about the management protocol we use the
same architecture with server monitor
this application is actually just
reading xml data and presenting it to
you in a GUI interface but that xml data
is available on the system we've
actually had customers be able to
extract that data and use that in their
own monitoring tools and so that's been
been very handy from that perspective
looking for more automated you know
scriptable analysis of this information
so just to review of the major xserve
configurations to highlight the new
compute node we actually currently
offers three configurations of our
excerpt so the first two are our you
know quote-unquote server configuration
single and dual processor you know
single hard drive up to 720 gigabytes of
internal storage cd-rom vga standard and
of course Mac os10 server unlimited
client license to highlight the new
compute node that we introduced in the
March timeframe is a machine
specifically optimized for compute
intensive tasks this is primarily in
response to customer requests for an
excerpt streamlined for things like
compute clustering and again if you're
in the compute cluster in session you
saw some of those units in a demo up on
stage so this machine is streamlined for
that two processors single hard drive
single Gigabit Ethernet the onboard
ethernet no video no cd-rom because you
don't want one of those in every single
unit and also much lower price than the
standard dual processor configuration
what's interesting about this unit is
while we targeted for compute clustering
tasks it's also been very popular in any
kind of computational intense
application it's been very popular for
things like web application servers
where you don't need a lot of storage on
the nose
good it's it's getting data from
external databases or things and so it's
been very interested in those kind of
deployments as well and of course you
know just to touch on it again you've
heard a lot about Michael Westen server
and the various sessions this week but
you know what really wraps up xserve and
the credible package is the mac OS x
server software and so in actually in
this session everything I'm going to be
talking about is focused on the
currently shipping mac OS x server
software jaguar server i'll touch out
the very end on some features that
benefits xserve deployments from the
Panther server at the very end but again
with with X server you know mac OS x
server unlimited client license in in
the server configurations with a wealth
of services built right in ready to be
deployed with out-of-the-box incredible
package so what I really wanted to get
into now in more depth is the deployment
issues and have a variety of topics from
rack and power and networking out to
software installations high availability
with IP failover backup and also a few
pointers on key command line tools that
I found system administrators might not
know about that are very essential
you're not familiar with some of the
special tools that we provide just
wanted to highlight those for you at the
end so wanted to start off with rach
since you know x serve as a rack-mounted
server one of the first requirements is
that you have a rack somewhere to put
this in and so while every now and then
we find an xserve you know out on a
table we kind of shy away from that it's
not designed for things like stacking on
top of it or monitors on top of it we
highly discourage that kind of
deployment this thing's built for racks
and we have quite a number of flexible
rock deployments xserve can support both
two posts and four post racks and so to
post is really handy we see this a lot
in in environments that have a lot of
networking gear already installed and
can install the xserve in a existing to
post rack it's a center mount bracket
that mounts on the side of the box it's
kind of cantilever mounted in the in the
unit I want to stress though and this
will come up there in a minute is that
if you ever plan on mounting an extra of
raid with xserve we really recommend you
go right out and get the four post rack
and I'll touch on that again
it from a for post-rock perspective one
of the key things to understand about
xserve is the depth requirement again we
packed a tremendous amount of technology
into a one-year form factor and it's a
28 inch deep unit and we recommend it be
installed in a rack that's 30 inches
deep or more yet show the bracket
support up to 36 inches of rack depth
right out of the box with no additional
brackets but that 30 inch depth is a
standard server depth and we we really
recommend you look at racks that meet
those requirements is a much cleaner
easier installation and gives you the
best environment now with the slot
loading xserve we did add based on
customer requests additional short
brackets that give you the ability to
mount xserve at 24 26 inches deep this
was a big request for people who had
existing a bee wax typically with audio
and video gear that were shorter and so
now with the slot load extra we have the
ability to mount that it mounts very
nicely the issue there that you just
have to understand is that we stole from
you know we don't get any shorter with
that so you still have about two inches
hanging out the back and a 26 inch rack
so if that's a rope reot you can
configure that in that standard racking
that works great you know just to
highlight that we include in the box you
know all the various mounting hardware
english and metric threads and one of
the things that we did based on customer
requests with the slot load xserve is we
included the cage nuts that get mounted
into the square hole rack so that you
have everything you need right in the
box so a couple couple suggestions and
recommendations based on feedback and
experience first and foremost you know
just a reminder extra braid you know
being a little bigger unit a little
heavier unit is designed exclusively for
for post-rock there's quite an extensive
mounting range but it's important that
it gets put into a four-post rack and so
if you're planning on adding one or
deploying them together start there very
important little suggestion you know
people are deploying several of these
bottom-up works better and then top down
I like to suggest
letting gravity do some work for you
it's real important you know to get the
units in nice and squarely and if you
let gravity just take care of the
positioning for you they stack up very
nicely plus once you get the first one
in the rest go in quite easily so a
little suggestion there with the slot
load xserve we also provided a
installation template it's actually a
metal bar with some holes in it and we
highly recommend you use this for your
final installation of the lid in the
unit what happens is you place this on
to when you attach the lid into the
rocky place the bracket on and you use
that as you tighten the screws into the
rack what happens is because the the lid
is what you actually mount in the rack
if you over tighten or under tighten the
screw the lid can be slightly deformed
in or out making either very very
difficult to get the xserve in or and
sometimes it can be actually a little
loose and they'll be complete too much
play in the rail and so this bracket was
designed to make sure everything's
perfect and with that bracket being used
tighten the screws in and the unit
slides right in just perfectly and so
that as a little suggestion that we've
added with any slot load xserve find a
little thing is that with a slot load
xserve we've added a CD protector
bracket to the slot load CD bay and we
really recommend you keep that protector
on during the entire installation
process I know a lot of first things
people want to do is pull it off and
look at the fascia of the unit but it's
best if that be left on it prevents any
deformation in the the fascia on where
the sweetie goes into the machine if
it's a torque too much you'll see a
slight bend in that unit as cosmetic it
doesn't affect the CD going in or out
but you know we like to make them look
as nice as possible in the rack and so
that protector provides that strength
during installation so I'm going to talk
a little bit about power and
environmental requirements you know we
have a nice advantage with the power
powerpc g4 processor in that the power
requirements and heat output compared to
other competing processors in the when
you form factor
our tend to be much lower and so I
wanted to highlight that for you here
the power supply is actually rated for
the worst possible condition with an
xserve so we actually rate the power
supply at 3.6 amps 345 wats that
includes margin on top of that in
reality it's pretty challenging to on a
single processor system to use more than
about 200 watts in the system and for
most typical configurations and in the
dual processor pretty challenging to use
more than 350 watts so this provides
some additional guidelines when you're
actually planning for example ups
deployment on the loads that are needed
we actually document specific
configurations and power and thermal
output requirement in our knowledge base
so there's actually if you go into the K
base k based on info at apple com search
on xserve and BTW you you'll find these
specs actually has flushed out in a lot
more detail we do several different
kinds of configurations and give you
that as example for power and heat
output and that gives a gives you some
scaling guidelines they're based on a
room requirement and obviously one of
the challenges is that when you have a
lot of these in a small space you want
to make sure that the room stays within
operational temperatures and to prevent
overheating now we do have system
monitors tracking temperatures but and
you'll get alerts if the systems get too
warm but you know proper environmental
is important for any kind of server
environment so just what does this
translate into UPS loads wanted to give
you some examples these are two common
APC UPS is a 1u 1000 UPS ideal for one
or two Xers and then a bigger APC three
you three thousand UPS that can handle
several lectures so just to give you
some guidelines of the single one ux u
PS give you a 30 minutes of power to a
typical configured xserve that would be
a dual processor xserve and around 15
minutes of kind of the worst case
scenario fully loaded fully maxed out
xserve okay for comparison the bigger x
the bigger bait APC UPS
or x6x serves a typical configuration
will give you around 15 minutes of power
and for a fully loaded worst-case
scenario around five minutes of power so
still plenty of time to do proper
shutdown procedures worth noting also
that APC has a software to connect these
eps is for proper shutdown behavior
networking so you know networking is
critical in a server environment and and
of course that's one of the main reasons
why we provided dual gigabit in that out
of the back of the machine so xserve
standard configurations come with dual
Gigabit Ethernet one built in on the
logic board and one in our AGP PCI combo
slot so one of the big advantages of the
xserve and that configuration is that we
have this combo slot it's really our
third pci slot and this can take either
a 4x high-performance AGP video card or
the way we configure it for standard
server configurations is a pci ethernet
card and so that gives you a second high
performance copper interconnects for
gigabit ethernet the pci ethernet card
actually is a slightly superior card
from a performance standpoint we found
it to be about ten to fifteen percent in
performance greater than the onboard
ethernet and what's interesting is that
that is the actual ethernet card we used
in some of the benchmarking for example
that set the web bench record that we we
did when we benchmark tslot low-tech
serves so a very strong performance in
that ethernet card and we tend to
recommend people use that as a primary
interface for serving serving clients a
little note though a remote setup
software and we'll talk more about that
in a minute prefers or expects to use
built-in ethernet okay so we recommend
what you do is use the built-in ethernet
to bring you system up and configure it
and use the pci you committed your
primary interface for your services okay
now get a lot of questions about people
looking for optical cards who want to
connect optical Gigabit Ethernet to the
system and they're actually several
third-party solutions apple doesn't
offer a card off of our store but there
are several key third-party solutions in
this space to provide that solution
asante has a
be the most popular card the 1000s X gig
index card and i just recently
discovered a vendor who has mac OS 10
drivers 3m has a line of optical cards
called volition that have mac OS 10
drivers and so that has a two optical
Gigabit Ethernet solutions and finally
get asked this a lot with the the slot
loading next serve the software that we
ship mac OS x server 10 24 had a new
feature in it called IP over firewire
and so when you added that to your ex
serve a new en tu would often show up in
the system preferences pane for ethernet
and that's actually IP / firewire matter
of fact and Panther server it actually
will show up named IP over firewire to
make it a little more obvious what that
is had a lot of people wonder did their
their server suddenly grown and you can
head in her face so this is really
exciting IP over firewire especially on
the slot loading nexor with having dual
800 megabit firewire on the back we can
use this as an IP interface my effects
we can chain down the rack with very
inexpensive firewire 19 29 pinned cables
and connect a bunch of Xers over IP over
firewire this gives us an ideal third
interface for for things like management
replications and IP failover watch you
talk about its use and IP failover and a
little bit it's a it's a you know think
of it as a built-in interface that you
can now very easily use for those
environments and it's very handy for
that it delivers very good performance
and you know just works like an ethernet
interface from that perspective you know
one of the benefits here that lets you
keep your high performance copper
gigabit ethernet ports available to
serve clients on on your network and use
this as a back channel for management
and things like that one thing I did
want to mention with IP over firewire is
that when you have those machines
connected together you want to be very
careful about plugging other devices in
so when one of the things the challenges
is that now that those machines are
connected together they're firewire
buses now
across those machines and one of the
great things about x servers we have a
firewire port on the front like to brag
with our friends and power mac we were
the first one to put the firewire on the
front of the machine so you put that
ipod in and plug it into the front you
actually have all the machines that are
connected with that firewire bus we'll
see it concurrently and so it could
actually mount on several machines which
would be less than desirable so just
something to be considering when you are
using IP over firewire to be very
careful plugging and additional devices
non IP over firewire type devices into
that firewire bus because it is a shared
bus SNMP one of the features that xserve
introduced in mac OS x server actually
with the original lexer with 10 15 is
SNMP SNMP capability and this has been
built in since then and there's a great
capability really wanted to call out and
highlight because we have a lot of
customers and in heterogeneous
environments who want to take advantage
of SNMP monitoring and plug it into
tools like open view or inner mapper or
some of the neon tools that we bundle on
the slot load xserve and this is built
in and the only challenges that is
deactivated by default and so you get to
turn it on you actually have to add one
line into SD host config and just say
snmp-server equals yes and that will
activate the SNMP stack and it will
start up automatically from then on out
it's worth noting that in and jaguar
snmp-server equals no is not in the
default script you actually have to add
it as a new line a lot of people look
can I just change no to yes it's
actually not in the in a host config
script you have to go in and add it and
then of course highly recommend you run
the SNMP comp tool which actually allows
you to plug in system specific
information you know hostname contact
information email address all the things
so that when you connect to it / SNMP
you get some meaningful information
beyond network statistics and other
valuable information that SNMP provides
back if you're not familiar with SNMP or
configuring it we have your great man
pages built in our implementation of
SNMP is actually based on net SNMP
and so there's a great resources of
course the net-snmp webpage that I'd
point you to for more information about
specifics about the mids and
configuration above and beyond what we
provide them the man pages wanted to
talk now about software installation you
know one of the great things about mac
OS x server on x servers we have a
variety of ways to configure the machine
and have because of the headless nature
of rackmount servers have a lot of new
tools that we've built for extra and
other environments to make it easy to
deploy these machines in in the rack our
goal is that you know if you want to
hook up a monitor and keyboard to an
xserve great go ahead it should work
just like you would expect but we want
to make it really easy to you know take
this extra brand new out of the box
rocket power it up and just configure it
remotely never ever having to connect a
monitor and keyboard and make that a
really great user experience and we
think we've done that so I wanted to
highlight the various methods of
configuring the software on xserve
before I get into that I wanted to
highlight a new feature that was in the
slot load xserve that we introduced with
a slot load xserve which we call our
front panel boot menu on the original
xserve the system identifier button the
button with the triangle on it when you
powered up the Machine and held that
button it was like holding down the ctrl
or it forced the machine to boot off the
CD ROM and that was great for for the
same kind of operation but what we found
out is that you know a lot of people
wanted to do some of the other things
that you could do with this what we call
the snag keys or the special keys on the
keyboard and so we've actually added
more features in the new of the new slot
load xserve to provide this and what
we've actually implemented is by using
the Late Show the two rows of eight blue
LEDs and the button on the front is
implemented a very simple boot menu on
the xserve so what you do is when you
power up the Machine you hold down that
same system identifier button for us a
couple seconds and what it will do is it
will actually flash and you'll get a
single blue LED that will count out
across the eight LED and now when you
press the system identifier button it
will indicate those LEDs from one to
eight from the right to the left and is
how you count that and each each LED
then has a special meaning and when
you've selected the number LED that
you're looking for you then hold down
the system identifier button for a few
seconds you'll see the indicator count
up and down and when you release it it
will go ahead and follow that action and
so what we have now is a seven commands
that can be implemented right on the
front of the extra without any
additional keyboard or other
interruption interaction obviously the
first one is boot from CD so you press
that if there's a CD and the drive it
will reject it very handy and when you
put a CD in it will now boot attempt to
boot from that CD if it's a bootable CD
the second one is like holding down the
NT it's the net boot command net food
will touch on this a little bit netboot
is a great way to mass deploy servers
you can use it for you know network
configuration have an image of the
Machine automatically or in cluster
environments you might choose to netboot
the entire cluster for a single system
image so you can do net suit right from
the front of the machine again no
keyboard needed the third light
indicates boot from the internal hard
drive and so what it will do is it will
start in Bay one which is the leftmost
hard drive and attempt to boot from that
and then boot from try to boot from the
drive two three and four so it will
basically search an internal drive base
for a viable boot hard drive if you
select option number four it will
actually attempt to boot from a device
other than the built-in device that
you've already chosen previously so if
you want to actually you know
troubleshoot your built-in system boot
drive and you want to instead boot off
an ipod or a firewire drive or something
you can select this option it will scan
and boot from the first available device
that it finds it's also worth noting so
i don't think i mentioned it elsewhere
in the slides you can actually boot off
of our extra raid and we actually have
people who are doing that so very handy
to be able to boot off a fibre channel
option number five it turns the xserve
into target disk mode now this is
extremely extremely powerful we'll talk
more about this in a sec
with target disk mode to basically turn
the xserve temporarily into a FireWire
hard drive and you can plug that into
your powerbook and and mount those hard
drives right over firewire like it was a
little little firewire hard drive what's
unique about the implementation on next
serve is that we've actually allow it to
mount all for hard drive bays okay so
you can have for hard drive bays and
rather than just booty showing dr 0 or
bay one i should say it will mount all
the available drives out through
firewire option number six of course is
that the pier am magic command and
finally option number seven is the
equivalent of booting into open firmware
this is very powerful for people who
want to kind of get under the hood and
give very specific commands to the
firmware we've also added some
intelligence to this if you don't have a
keyboard plugged in it automatically
activates the serial port on the back as
a console so you can go right into the
serial port tell it to boot off of a
specific device to do specific
troubleshooting that you might want to
do at the open firmware level which is
fortunately very very rare but when you
want to do it it's very easy to activate
that so one of the high like that
because we'll use that in context of
some of these examples so you know I
want to take the first and easiest
implementation of deploying exersaucer
which is the the easy plug in the
keyboard and mouse method and you know
this is you know works just like you
would expect you know plug it in boot
from the CD install it off you go just
like you would any other machine very
simple very straightforward when you
have the ability to have a keyboard and
mouse handy to be plugged in what's also
interesting about this approach is using
the target disk mode function we can
install using the xserve really like it
was a target hard drive so this is
really great you can take your powerbook
turn your foot your xserve into a hard
drive plug it in install from your
powerbook onto the xserve like it was a
boot drive and actually install mac OS x
server through that method using your
powerbook or other other firewire
capable macintosh system as your screen
and keyboard and actually host processor
at that time so a very very easy way to
deploy and reimage and manipulate the
software on
rex serve it's also really handy in the
rack because what you can do is you can
take one configured xserve mount a
second-deck serve in the rack with a
short little firewire cable in the
rockies in the front amount of firewire
ports and just move data from one extra
to the other over firewire target disk
mode is actually now you can clone one
machine configuration to another over
firewire rather trivially with fire
water target disk mode so this is a
really handy feature you can use in
these environments the next thing I
wanted to talk about is remote
configuration user server assistant this
was a specific feature we added to
support headless installation of the
software for xserve but yet provide a
really simplified and powerful user
experience so it still provides a
graphical user interface the way this
works is that you again using the front
panel mode can boot the system from a CD
from the install install CD that comes
with xserve you boot that up and if
you've ever wondered why it takes a
little bit longer to boot mac OS x
server cds on the ex service because
it's creating this remote hosting
capability what it's actually doing is
booting the environment creating making
networking available and then what you
do is run a utility called server
assistant that you run on a remote host
powerbook for example that's plugged
into the network on the same subnet you
find that xserve remotely using a
rendezvous type technology and then
configure the system through the same
server assistant you would see as if you
are on the machine locally to give you
an idea what this looks like what you do
is this is from a client machine you run
for on your powerbook the server
assistant and it comes up and asks you
what do you want to do do you want to
configure a remote machine or install a
server or reinstall the server software
so you can actually do a complete
reinstallation in a headless environment
so in this case we'll reinstall or
install mac OS x server software it will
then scan your local subnet using again
the same protocol as rendezvous looking
for machines on that subnet and it will
list their current IP address their mac
address if you can validate the exact
hardware
course that you're talking to and what
it thinks its host name is and these
will refresh you might see one you might
see a dozen servers depending on how
many are in configuration mode and I'm
going to stress that this is only
available when it's in this booted but
booted configuration load this isn't
something that you can connect to to an
xserve at any time obviously for
security reasons you don't want to make
it easy for anyone to reinstall your
server software so once you find this
machine that you're looking for you
click on it continue and it will prompt
you for a password and because the
machines in a in a remote configuration
mode the machine could be in an unknown
state what we've decided to use is the
authentication is actually the hardware
serial number of the machine so you
actually use the first eight digits of
the hardware serial number and that's
actually why we put the serial number on
the back of the machine and on the front
inside of the machine if you just slide
open the xserve about two inches you'll
see a little printed serial number tag
on the inside of the machine as well as
on the back making it very easy to get
access to information so you enter the
first eight digits of the serial number
to authenticate it will continue and you
then continue through the assistant just
like you would locally you know language
boot device option packs you want
installed ask you for your IP address
all the questions you would answer
normally now we're being done remotely
it's sending those remote commands over
to the machine in an encrypted fashion
basically using an SSH type encrypted
communication session the machine will
configure it soft reboot and then it's
in exactly a known state that you can
login to as the administrator with
server administration tools and
configure all your your services from
there on out it's a very very powerful
and simple user interface to to do this
remote server assistant mode the other
the other approach I wanted to talk
about briefly is network install so one
of the abilities you have to do and this
is really handy when you're deploying a
large number of xserve in a in a given
environment is to use the network
install capabilities that's built into
mac OS x server so basically using a
server as kind of a hosting server that
can host an install environment for
or other machines on the network so you
can create a disk image using the
network image utility that's in 10 to
server we highly recommend if you're
doing a server install that you use
version 10 to five or later the network
image utility that ships with ten to
five or later note that you'd the system
software that you're installing on the
machine doesn't have to be necessarily
at that revision but the utility that
creates the disk image needs to be there
are actually some specific server of
things that were addressed in 10 25
version he then so what we'll do is you
run you run this utility will actually
ask you for the server software CD you
place that in the machine and off you go
to create that image you then can never
eat that off and it's just like bleeding
from CD and have that administration
capability so here's a look at the
actual utility itself being able to
create an install image it will create
that image in off you go you can make
that your netboot Network image that's
available the the last thing I wanted to
talk about is probably one of the most
powerful tools for extra of deployment
which is a command line tool called ASR
this is a tool that allows you to
basically take an image of a server that
can be completely configured and blasted
on to other machines it's very fast very
efficient and can be very flexible in
the way you use this machine so you
literally can take a known boot image
slop it in one Bay of an extra take a
blank drive in the other Bay of the
image pull up terminal type in ASR you
know target source volume target volume
some optional flags depending on if you
want to use them for both options and
erase of options are highly recommended
and off you go it will clone that dry
that's now perfectly bootable Drive you
can stick in another excerpt and bring
up in a completely known environment now
what's really amazing about ASR is that
you have the ability to host these disk
images that become the image that you're
blasting onto a server from a web server
so imagine this you can create a
pristine image of every server type of
server the
in your environment this is the web
server this is the DNS server this is a
file server create a disk image of it
whether it be for backup or for
replication purposes put that image up
on a web server and using the HTTP URL
to that disk image as the source image
blast that from a web server onto a onto
a hard drive very very amazing
capability very fast very efficient last
night oh the other thing I wanted to
mention is that there actually some
unique third-party Apple cut products
coming that help this environment this
is a prototype of a product that a
company called extreme Mac is working on
and will be a shipping shortly this is a
apple drive module device that has
firewire on the back should be able to
take this device plug it into a
powerbook of power mac and read and
write to apple drive modules for
configuration take this out stick it in
there next serve and a very easy way to
deploy images and software onto an
xserve drive from a host machine to look
forward to products like that providing
new options for you as well so one of
those things I wanted to talk about kind
of moving topics here is availability so
mac OS x server has a unique
architecture in intent to server called
IP failover that provides a way to have
two servers kind of provide a
master-slave failover environment for
availability and this is built into a
jaguar server requires a connection be
connected between a private IP
connection between two servers for use
as a heartbeat so what happens is we
have two servers on a common private
network that are passing a heartbeat
between the two of them saying you know
I'm alive are you alive and this is
ideal for using IP over firewire again a
small firewire cable between two servers
with IP over firewire gives you the
perfect connection for this kind of
environment it has the ability to
failover so once server goes out the
other machine takes over and then fail
back so when the other machine comes
back up have it resolved it services
back and this is ideal out of the box
for static service tax services things
like QuickTime streaming web services
DNS where the data behind the service
doesn't change on a frequent basis
because a very important in it and of
itself does not replicate data and we'll
talk about strategies for at in a minute
so I just wanted to give you a graphical
environment of what this looks like so
we have two servers and what's important
about this is that the secondary server
doesn't have to be a server just sitting
idle doing nothing that just is waiting
for the primary server to fail both
servers can be actively serving other
other services and what we have here are
machines that have a minimum of two
Ethernet interfaces or IP over firewire
each one has its own unique public
interface and public IP address here the
primary servers 1001 1 and the secondary
server is 1001 dot 2 and then they have
a private interface again this could be
a thur net or IP over firewire that they
use to communicate privately between
them for heartbeat information in this
case it's the 192 addresses one and dot
two and so these machines are sending
again a live messages between the two
machines now let's give good in a
situation where the primary server for
any number of reasons dies whether it be
the network link or hardware failure the
machine men would stop sending heartbeat
messages to the secondary server at that
point the secondary server using the IP
fail of our ability would kick off a
series of scripts that would determine
the specific actions that would happen
in this case you know our primary server
is a web server or secondary is a
streaming server what we might choose to
do here is fire up the web server on the
secondary server and what it will do is
it will add it will take over the IP
address of the primary server
becoming its presence on the network so
in this case we're keeping both services
alive both web services and streaming
services and because the IP address is
assigned to those continued to be alive
the clients autumn and network would see
no loss of services those because this
is completely script driven though you
have the ability to tune the exact
behavior you might decide the web
services of high transactional ability
and decide that you really need to kill
off the streaming server or maybe just
nice it down to a much lower priority
because these are all scripts that
determine this behavior you have that
ability to determine that exact behavior
now as I mentioned IP failover does not
replicate data okay so obviously the
service needs to be able to fire up and
run that service in the proper law
configuration so you need to have
datastage there and configuration file
stage there for the situations when
those get fired off and obviously you
can use tools like rsync is just one
example to replicate that data between
the two services so this can be very
powerful for the appropriate services
obviously this architecture is not not
ideal for things like file services that
have heavy data requirements behind it
you can imagine if it's my home
directory server and I failover to a
secondary server for my home directory
isn't there it's not good to me that the
server has is still available it's the
data behind it that's important so this
is really ideal for things like web
services and streaming services as two
examples again I want to stress that
these are script driven so you have
complete flexibility over the exact
behaviors of what happens we actually
provide sample scripts which you then
can customize and tuned to your specific
environment it also has the ability to
send email notifications and things like
that so that you know when you're in
this kind of situation
those handing go into as much as a much
detail but we ought there also
corresponding scripts to determine what
happens when the primary server comes
back up so we sail back and bring the
original services up as expected i also
want to stress that for availability IP
failover isn't the only strategy many
applications have their own architecture
for IP failover or for high availability
really and that's the best way to handle
availability because you can determine
that on application for specific basis
some examples are stalkers communicate
have a excellent to node clustered
version that provides a high
availability mail server and again
having application level awareness is
much better than a generic service and
that's an excellent for solution for
those environments I piece a lavar also
isn't the only way to achieve
availability using external load
balancers for things like multiple web
servers that can take a server out of
the loop when a server fails is also
another option and I also wanted to
mention a new third party option from a
fibre channel storage perspective you
know one of the questions I get asked a
lot as well if we could put our storage
out on say an extra of raid an external
storage device could we have that
storage move over to the second server
so that my home directories do follow me
if I fail over to a secondary server
obviously this requires the ability to
map the storage from one machine to
another and while we don't provide that
functionality out of the box company
called a stair has some new drivers for
their fibre channel cards that have
scriptable capabilities to do this so
this is brand-new haven't tested it yet
but it looks like a promising solution
that could really complement a IP
failover configuration i also just
wanted to finish by talking about backup
you know back up as a continual
challenge given the huge quantities of
data we're able to host given the
turnover of data how much data turn
turns on a regular basis and the
realities at the time we have to back up
is can
shrinking the other reality is that raid
while very critical from a server
deployment perspective to provide data
availability in and of itself is not a
backup solution so when it first of all
update on the latest options available
for backing up on Mac OS 10 server so in
a first and foremost dance retrospect
product continues to have both client
server solutions for Mac OS 10 so that
that product continues to be available
we have clients for a number of
enterprise backup solutions arico legato
pterodactyl tivoli veritas as some
examples so why we can't be the backup
engine we can be a client to an existing
and enterprise backup solution in the
reality is if you're deploying an xserve
into an existing heterogeneous
environments it's very likely already
have one of these out there already and
so can plug into those environments and
finally one of the most recent addition
to the backup space of for mac OS 10 is
a third-party product from the tallest
group called BR you this product is
interesting from a number of
perspectives first of all one of the
first backup engines available on Mac OS
10 that can back up on multiple tape
drives concurrently so it can drive
multiple tape heads you know when you
need to back up a large amount of data
fast multiple pay pads is one of the the
only way you can achieve that it can
drive very large tape libraries it's
driver agnostic so it's been able to
plug in just about every tape backup
device I've seen so far and then come
back up over any available i/o channel
whether it be you know entry-level USB
or firewire devices scuzzy changers or
rather uniquely backup over fibre
channel so they're some of the
higher-end backup solutions are actually
connected over fibre channel this is
particularly interesting because you can
get the backup data movement off of your
Ethernet network and use the bandwidth
available on fibre channel that's a
really excellent solution the other big
trend that we're seeing is just to disk
backup given the data turn on a regular
basis and the quantities of data is
really hard for tape to keep up and so
we're seeing more and more customers
deploy X or of an extra raid
as backup solutions and there are a
number of ways you can do this number of
software techniques but basically for
the low cost of storage available with
xserve and extra raid you know use an
extra raid as a backup target going just
to disk and whether it be multiple
servers backing up over networking /
Gigabit Ethernet to a backup repository
or going over fibre channel as a
secondary even off-site one of the
benefits of fiber channels we can go you
know hundreds of meters even kilometers
out over optical fibre channel for
off-site replication on a second extra
raid so this is a really growing trend
in for large databases large data set
this is a very viable way to do backup
so just to finish up the last thing I
wanted to highlight were somewhat I'll
consider essential commands from a
command-line perspective that can
complement a extra of deployment
scenario I get asked all the time you
know I'm coming from another UNIX
platform and you know if config doesn't
always work the way I expected to on Mac
OS 10 or how do I do this command on Mac
OS 10 so I wanted to really highlight
some of the commands that are unique to
Mac OS 10 but give you very powerful
capabilities first of all there's two
very powerful system configuration tools
the most important being network set up
everything you can do in the network of
preference pane in Mac OS 10 you can do
through scripting or through command
line in network setup you can turn on
and off interfaces reorder them set them
to dhcp set them to static IP addresses
get what current values are set a very
very powerful tool so rather than if
config make sure you look up the man
page for network setup and actually if
you just type network setup at the
command line it will spit back all of
its options we have a similar tool
called system setup that gives you
access to a lot of the preference type
information system name date and time
network time server on and on and on
system management tools one of the ones
I find most valuable are the disk
utility command disk utility is the
command line equivalent of disk utility
app lets you do things like create raid
sets destroy rates that's rebuild raid
set partition
disk format discs very very handy for a
configuration also great because you can
script this very powerfully and so
completely automate a specific setup
requirement we have a number of tools
for things like directory services vs
import/export to be able to batch import
users in and out create home directory
well until you log in from the GUI your
home directory isn't created and so you
can force it to be created using this
command line option obviously the SNMP
configuration tool and this to base
monitor is a background demon that will
monitor disk utilization on the server
and if you do a man on that that command
you can see it has some very powerful
capabilities for learning you about disk
operations finally a software update
command line software update to be able
to from SSH update to the latest
versions of software through software
update this key finder is an interesting
little utility it's a utility that will
return the Bay number of the driving
your xserve so if you ever want to
configure from a past name into a bay
one bay to bay three bay for this little
utility will do that very handy for
script and of course there's a
command-line installer to be able to
install packages of the command line and
finally the ASR command we referenced
earlier so just to wrap up this session
we're running very close out of time
here you know the reality is that you
know with ITV being faced with continual
challenges being able to deploy machines
and services we really feel that with
extra van eck mac OS x server and extra
raid we can you know simplify server
deployment provide faster services at
lower costs with much easier system
administration experience now there's
been a lot of talk about Panther server
over the course of this week I really
just wanted to highlight a few quick
features that are unique we think will
be very handy for xserve deployments
number of unique features one of the
most important ones being the automatic
setup feature
we can take the setup experience and
automate it even further than what we
talked about today finally just to wrap
up wanted to point you to some other
sessions many of these were done earlier
in the week so if you weren't able to
attend them encourage you to watch the
videos when they're available highlight
the deploy next to raid session that's
tomorrow afternoon talk more in depth
about the storage side of our server
products I also wanted to highlight some
of the enterprise some of the developer
and core OS applications that I think
are important from a system
administrator side again a lot of these
actually all of these happened earlier
this week but again video opportunities
for replay and finally an invitation
welcome feedback questions and comments
and your my email address is here d
brooks always welcome your feedback on
xserve and your particular deployments
and scenarios finally from a developer
perspective skip Levin's is our server
technology evangelist and his email is
up there from from a developer side with
specific development level questions and
resources finally some some key
references we have put a tremendous
amount of effort into putting more
resources available on the xserve and
server web pages we have a lot of
resources there and we'll continue to
grow those over time have apple.com /
servers kind of the one-stop shopping
point for that location a very very
valuable mailing list that Apple hosts
on our listserv is the mac OS x server
mailing list
you