Agenda

Virtualisation

Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5 ships as standard with features that allow it to provide a highly available virtualisation environment. This includes a hypervisor, virtual guest management tooling, and clustering technologies.

The aim of this track is to demonstrate these features, along with some upcoming virtualisation tools.

P2V

A common requirement is to take a bare metal system and convert this to a virtual guest image on a hypervisor system. The resulting guest system image will then be used for the rest of the track.

Managing single virtguest and cloning into three

Virtualisation makes it easy to clone guest systems. During this session, we'll be looking at ways to achieve this, and some of the systems management features provided by Red Hat Enterprise Linux Virtualisation.

Create a virtual cluster

Using the inbuilt clustering technology, and a second hypervisor system, we will now cluster the two hypervisors. This will allow us to treat the virtual guest system as an Highly Available resource. We will demonstrate live migration of the image, and automatic failover when the hypervisor the guest is running on dies.

Time	Theme of presentation
13:00	Welcome
13:10	PV2
13:50	Managing single virtguest and cloning into three
14:30	Coffee break
14:45	Convert 3 cloned guests to virt cluster
15:20	Q & A
15:30	Drinks and snacks

Satellite

Red Hat Network Satellite is an advanced system management application which simplifies system administration and provides advanced features to assist in deploying and maintaining large numbers of systems. This session will explore some of the features of Satellite Server such as deploying and managing virtual machines, using system profiles to clone machine and using custom software channels and the RHN API to streamline enterprise software management.

Kickstarting and Bare Metal Builds

Kickstart is Red Hat's automated system installation mechanism. Using the provisioning module in Satellite Server it is possible to create kickstart files and deploy new installations centrally from the server. When combined with the new support for virtualisation in RHEL 5 and Satellite 5, this session will illustrate how defining and deploying a virtual machine.

Software Management and Profiles

One of the principal features of Satellite server is its ability to manage software installations and updates across a large number of machines. This session will focus on managing and deploying errata, adding systems to a Satellite, managing system groups and cloning systems using system profiles.

Channel Management and the RHN API

Channels are a fundamental concept in the Red Hat Network, and are used to organise software and configuration files into sensible divisions. Satellite server provides a number of useful features for the management of channels such as cloning and synchronising. In addition, the RHN API provides an alternative interface so that certain tasks can be automated.

Time	Theme of presentation
13:00	Welcome
13:10	Kickstarting and build virt machine
13:50	Software management, add old machine via bootstrap, use ssm, register 4th machine and use profiles
14:30	Coffee break
14:45	Channel management and API
15:20	Q & A
15:30	Drinks and snacks

Developer Tools, Performance and Tuning

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is optimised out of the box for a wide range of general workloads performed by many different customers. Sometimes there is a requirement to take the optimisation further and fully optimise a system for one specific workload to maximise the performance available from the hardware for that single task. This session is aimed at showing you some of the tools than can be used to achieve this goal.

General system performance tuning

Depending on what you are trying to achieve there are a large number of general system performance tweaks that can be applied to a system, from the underlying network stack to key kernel and file system tuning options. This session will introduce you to some of these and show you some quick wins for tuning your machines.

System/Application profiling, systemtap, oprofile

Once you have completed some of the initial system performance tuning actions, you will need to dig further into the performance of both the underlying system and the application you want to tune in order to find out what the system is spending its time doing and how you can reduce that time through further optimisation. This session will show you how to use the tools, analyse the results and what to do when you have the results.

JBoss tuning

One very common workload is that of a J2EE Application Server. There are a number of tasks specific to the tuning of a J2EE application server that can provide significant performance improvements. The Red Hat JBoss Application server is highly configurable with significant opportunity for customisation to a particular J2EE application. How to use less memory, serve more clients and get better performance.

Time	Theme of presentation
13:00	Welcome
13:10	General system performance tuning
13:50	System profiling, systemtap, oprofile
14:30	Coffee break
14:45	JBoss tuning
15:20	Q & A
15:30	Drinks and snacks