To make it easy for customers that rely heavily on an NFS server for their on-premises applications, we created an Oracle Linux Storage Appliance image for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

There are times where you want to be able to provide a really fast shared filesystem to multiple instances. eg. a shared 'Oracle Home'  or in the applications world a shared APPLTOP. It is really easy to set up a Linux NFS server but we decided to go beyond DIY and we created one for you.

The Linux Storage Appliance image available in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure uses Oracle Linux 7 on your choice of either a BM dense IO (28.8TB NVMe/512G) node or BM high IO (12.8TB NVMe/512G) node. When you deploy the LSA image, at first boot, it automatically detects the NVMe volumes, creates a big raid with filesystems on top and starts a simple webserver that lets you create new shares, see log files,  see the status of the server etc.

We have a roadmap of items that we are working on, such as auto-restart, backup to object storage, iscsi volume support as an alternative to NVMe to create smaller setups, etc...

The Linux Storage Appliance image is provided for everyone to use, it runs within your own tenancy and with your own resource quota for the servers it is deployed on.

You can find more details here. 

Here are a few screenshots to give you an idea:

Just in time for Oracle OpenWorld 2017!

For quite some time now, we have had a Container Registry available for users with an Oracle Single-Signon account. This registry contains a large number of Docker images to make it really easy to get started with Oracle Products such as the Oracle Database, MySQL, Oracle Linux, Java, Weblogic etc...No need to create or register a new account. Many of you already have an Oracle SSO account for use with OTN, My Oracle Support or Oracle Software Delivery Cloud.

The first time, you have to log in to the website hosted at http://container-registry.oracle.com (use your SSO account) and accept the licences for the products you want to download/pull with the Docker client. Once you have accepted the licenses, unless a license changes, or you want to access a product for which you have not yet accepted the license, you do not have to login to the website any more. From here on, you can use docker pull container-registry.oracle.com/<repository>/<product> to pull down the images you are interested in. 

Well, the above is not new, really but I wanted to give a very quick overview of what we have on our container registry.

What IS new:

Lots of our customers are using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and there is a big interest in using Docker images for new projects. Since we want our customers/developers to have the best experience, we created / will create local mirrors of the central Container Registry in each OCI region. As of right now, the Ashburn and Phoenix OCI regions mirrors are online, Frankfurt will follow shortly. Why does this help? Well, first of all, performance. A few examples: timing a pull (and extract) of an Oracle Linux 7-slim image is just over 3 seconds. MySQL Community server 8 seconds, Oracle Database Standard or Enteprise Edition 3 minutes (full downloaded and extracted in your local OCI instance). And secondly, all network traffic stays within the Oracle Datacenters so you are not consuming Internet Traffic bandwidth.

The process remains the same: the main website to accept licenses is still http://container-registry.oracle.com. When you use docker on the command line in your instance, use either container-registry-phx.oracle.com or container-registry-ash.oracle.com. In the near future we will enable container-registry-fra.oracle.com. 

First you have to login on the command line:

# docker login container-registry-ash.oracle.com
Username: wim.coekaerts@oracle.com
Password: 
Login Succeeded

Next you can pull one of the many images:

# docker pull container-registry-ash.oracle.com/os/oraclelinux:7-slim
7-slim: Pulling from os/oraclelinux
d9ca67fed2e2: Pull complete 
Digest: sha256:2c4be3230da36933e1e9961909ed40c7fc3cc36107f86c2ed6c1775ea1c884fc
Status: Downloaded newer image for container-registry-ash.oracle.com/os/oraclelinux:7-slim

These registries are also accessible from outside of the OCI regions over the internet so if you experience slow access to container-registry.oracle.com, try one of these new ones.

We have a number of product categories available. You can find all the details on how to use them, which tags (versions of images such as 7.1 7.4, latest,...) on the registry website:

We are working on providing a mirror for http://yum.oracle.com inside OCI as well. Stay tuned for more Oracle Linux goodies in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

It's been a while since my last post so a lot of stuff has been going on! This one will be a random collection of things that I want to point out. I will have to use a lot of tags to keep search engines happy here :-)

Where to start...

Preview release : Oracle Linux 7 for ARM64 (aarch64)

Given the growing interest in ARM64.  We created a publicly available, free download, no registration keys, no access codes, no authentication codes,version of OL7 for ARM64. You can go download it here:  http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/linux/downloads/oracle-linux-arm-4072846.html

We have an ISO you can install on a few available ARM64 servers, more servers will be tested and added over time. (See release notes) and we also created a little runtime image for the RPI3. That way you can easily try it out in minutes on a cheap, readily available platform.

Tons of RPMs have been built and are on http://yum.oracle.com (specifically: http://yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL7/latest/aarch64/index.html ) We currently use a 4.13 kernel but that will soon move to 4.14 (basis for the next version of UEK).

One of the reasons we do a preview release right now and not GA is because it's still a fast moving target. Lots of kernel changes coming, we're looking at providing the latest toolchain, gcc7, create a good public developer program around Oracle Linux for ARM64 and the introduction of new platforms over the next several months that might require adding new drivers, compile the binaries with better optimizations etc... so right now I would not want  to call this Generally Available. It's certainly in a good state for developers to start using and get their feet wet, for partners that are interested in ARM to start porting apps and work with us as we improve performance and build out the developer ecosystem. It's certainly an exciting development. We're working on all the usual things, we are working on ksplice,  dtrace, lots of server side enhancements that are still missing, testing of kvm, seeing if we can build even the kernel with gcc7.2? Pick the right chip to target for optimizations...

New packages for Oracle Linux

Over the last several months we started adding a ton of new RPMs on yum to make it easier for admins and developers that want newer stuff that's just not typically available directly from the Enterprise Linux vendor side.

We track the latest versions of terraform (and the OCI-provider for terraform), we released dotnet2.0, powershell updates, over a 1000 RPMs added from the EPEL repository, docker 17.06. We packaged the OCI SDK and CLI into RPMs to make it easy (no need to run pip install).

For the nitpickers - as I mentioned previously, we are just replicating EPEL, we are not 'forking' it, we are not modifying source, the intent is to have it available from the same 'location', signed by us, built by us tested together in terms of dependencies. It's still EPEL. If we were to find bugs or whatever we'd get that fixed on the EPEL source side. No other intent... just to re-iterate that.

"What's new" on yum

Since we do a lot of packages updates on yum.oracle.com, we added a what's new page, it lists new RPMs that are published every day and we keep 6 months of history. This way  you can easily see if something got updated without having to run yum commands on a server.

Kernel Blog

In order to be more public about the type of development projects we have going on, we are finally back to writing regular articles about various kernel projects. You can find that here. It's a random collection of things developers will write up, stuff they worked on in the past or something like that. It gives a bit more context than just seeing commit messages. We started this way back when, then it went dormant but we picked it up again. Some good stuff can be found there.

Linux NFS appliance image for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Regular updates continue on our Linux NFS appliance image that can be found here. An easy way to create a Linux-based NFS server in your own tenancy. It's not an NFS service, it's just a standard Oracle Linux image that creates an NFS  server setup.

Oracle Container Registry

A reminder that we have replicas of the Oracle Container registry in each of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure regions for fast, internal to the region access to our docker images.

container-registry-ash.oracle.com (Ashburn datacenter)

container-registry-phx.oracle.com (Phoenix datacenter)

container-registry-fra.oracle.com (Frankfurt datacenter)

These registries are also externally accessible so you can use it from wherever you are. Pick the one that's fastest for you.

We will introduce yum replicas soon as well.

Visual Studio Code is a popular editor. There is an RPM available for "el7" from the Microsoft yumrepo. This RPM can be manually downloaded on Oracle Linux 7 and installed with # yum localinstall code...  or # rpm -ivh code... but it's easier to just create a yum repo file so that you can just do # yum install code and # yum update code.

Here's an example. On Oracle Linux 7 (not 6), as user root:

# cd /etc/yum.repos.d

create a file, let's say vscode.repo with the following content:

[vscode]
name=vscode
baseurl=https://packages.microsoft.com/yumrepos/vscode/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc
 

and now you can just do

# yum install code
Loaded plugins: langpacks, ulninfo
vscode                                                   | 2.9 kB     00:00     
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package code.x86_64 0:1.18.1-1510857496.el7 will be installed
y
--> Finished Dependency Resolution

Dependencies Resolved

================================================================================
 Package      Arch           Version                       Repository      Size
================================================================================
Installing:
 code         x86_64         1.18.1-1510857496.el7         vscode          63 M

Transaction Summary
================================================================================
Install  1 Package

Total download size: 63 M
Installed size: 186 M
Is this ok [y/d/N]: Downloading packages:
code-1.18.1-1510857496.el7.x86_64.rpm                      |  63 MB   00:41     
Running transaction check
Running transaction test
Transaction test succeeded
Running transaction
Warning: RPMDB altered outside of yum.
  Installing : code-1.18.1-1510857496.el7.x86_64                            1/1
  Verifying  : code-1.18.1-1510857496.el7.x86_64                            1/1

Installed:
  code.x86_64 0:1.18.1-1510857496.el7                                           

Complete!

That's it.

For the folks that don't check our awesomely cool what's new page :-) on yum.oracle.com : whats new here's a bit of a summary of some of the cool packages we just added in the last week or 2:

- latest version of terraform (0.11.1-1) and soon a new terraform-provider-oci

- VirtualBox-5.2-5.2.2 updates in the developer repo so you can just yum install it instead of downloading it manually

- a TON, and I mean a TON more packages in our EPEL clone (again, no forking or modifying we just want to make sure it comes from the same place and is signed by us and built by us and we also clone our yum repo inside Oracle Cloud so customers don't get charged for network bandwidth when they download packages for the OS. By having our EPEL clone it counts for all those packages as well of course). Last time I checked we had about 7500 RPMs in the EPEL repo.

- the latest tagged version of the OCI python SDK and CLI (1.3.11 and 2.4.13) - we had a bit of a delay in the past but that's resolved and we're caught up

- GlusterFS server is now in the developer repository for both OL6 and OL78

- we now have an em agent 13cr2 preinstall rpm for OL7 (in add ons) to make it easy to install em agent

- UEK4 update 6 was released yesterday.

More stuff coming soon...

Just in time for the holidays.

A bunch of new RPMs released in a bunch of new channels on http://yum.oracle.com.

- node.js 4, node.js 6 and node.js 8 for both OL6 and OL7 along with the node-oracledb-12c add-on that lets you connect to oracle Databases out of the box.

- php 7.0 and php 7.1

more stuff in EPEL

have fun...

Basically - added 17.09.1 and 1.8.4-2.0.1 to http://yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL7/preview/x86_64/index.html

Enjoy.

I mentioned in a previous post that this was coming... well it's here now! :)

We have local mirrors of yum.oracle.com inside the OCI regions:

http://yum-fra.oracle.com

http://yum-ash.oracle.com

http://yum-phx.oracle.com

Unlike our Oracle Container Registry mirrors, these yum repos are only available from inside the OCI regions. So if you have instances in a given region, you can point your yum.repo to your local server and you get (1) very fast yum installs and (2) no counting against your network bandwidth since it doesn't leave the datacenters. Oracle Linux 6 and 7 are mirrored, we are also adding Oracle Linux 5.

This has been a long time coming... but finally... for those that don't regularly check our 'What's new' page on yum.oracle.com...

We started building the kernel modules and guest additions for VirtualBox guests for Oracle Linux 6 and 7 (UEK4):

• Packages Released on Fri Dec 22 2017 
  • VirtualBox-5.2-5.2.4_119785_el7-1 - Oracle VM VirtualBox (Update) 
  • vboxguest-tools-5.2.4-1.el7 - VirtualBox guest utilities (New) 
  • kmod-vboxguest-uek4-5.2.4-1.el7 - vboxguest kernel modules (New) 
  • VirtualBox-5.2-5.2.4_119785_el6-1 - Oracle VM VirtualBox (Update) 
  • vboxguest-tools-5.2.4-1.el6 - VirtualBox guest utilities (New) 
  • kmod-vboxguest-uek4-5.2.4-1.el6 - vboxguest kernel modules (New)

The main reason for doing this is to make it easy to have a guest with the additions installed. No need to install gcc and kernel-devel etc... it makes the image smaller or even if you remove gcc etc afterwards you have to compact the filesystem again and so on. Anyway... I hope people like this. I think it's pretty cool and I will use it a lot when building VirtualBox guest images.

On a side note, my previous blog post about yum in OCI... someone asked if we plan to do https as well as http. Yes, we plan to do that it's being worked on.

Oracle Solaris 11.4 Beta is downloadable from OTN as of right now.  This is a very exciting milestone. Go and download it and play with it!

For more information see:

https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/oracle-solaris-114-open-beta-released

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/114beta/solaris114beta-4257760.html

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37838_01/

A lot of developers are using TensorFlow for Machine Learning these days. In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure we provide some great GPU options. One of them is the BM.GPU2.2 shape which is an X7-based GPU system (contains 2 P100 Nvidia GPUs).

When you create an OCI instance using this shape with Oracle Linux 7, it comes pre-installed with the kernel modules to enable the GPUs. Ready to use.

Getting TensorFlow installed is very easy:

Install some prerequisite RPMs, some come from the EPEL yum repo which we provide as part of Oracle Linux and is enabled by default in your yum.repos file.

# sudo yum -y install python-pip python-devel atlas atlas-devel gcc-gfortran openssl-devel libffi-devel

# sudo pip install --upgrade virtualenv

# virtualenv --system-site-packages ~/venvs/tensorflow

# source ~/venvs/tensorflow/bin/activate

Now you can install TensorFlow using pip. use tensorflow-gpu if you want the GPU enabled version otherwise just use tensorflow.

(tensorflow) # pip install --upgrade tensorflow-gpu

or

(tensorflow) # pip install --upgrade tensorflow

To use tensorflow-gpu you have to install the Nvidia CUDA packages. This version of tensorflow depends on version 9.0

(tensorflow) # sudo yum -y install cuda-9-0

Run a TF example:

(tensorflow) #  pip install pandas

(tensorflow) # sudo yum -y install git

(tensorflow) # mkdir git

(tensorflow) # cd git

(tensorflow) # git clone https://github.com/tensorflow/models

(tensorflow) # cd models/samples/core/get_started/

(tensorflow) # python premade_estimator.py

and that's it. Super easy without any manual downloads.

Might have taken us a while but you can now use https in your .repo files to connect to our yum repositories.

We will transition the repo files we ship over time but we don't want to break people that have customizations.

So in the meantime, if you have repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d that point to http://yum.oracle.com or http://public-yum.oracle.com you can just do a search/replace.

Something like:

and then replace the repo file.

UPDATE:

we really want to get away from people using public-yum and use yum.oracle.com instead... so the sed command should be

Don't forget to check the Linux kernel team's blog. We're having a regular cadence now to write up things that are hopefully interesting. Projects the developers are working on or have worked on etc...

I stole Sergio's headline here and I am just going to link to his blog :)...

Sergio wrote up a how-to on using a let's encrypt cert and installing it on OL using nginx in an Oracle Cloud instance created and deployed with Terraform.

That 's a lot of words right there but it should demonstrate a few things:

• All the extra packages we have been publishing of late in the Oracle Linux EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) mirror. (yes they're the same packages but they're built on Oracle Linux, the packages are signed by us and they're on the same yum repo so you don't have to install separate files to get to it.) This includes certbot etc.. that you need for this.
• The convenience of having terraform, terraform-provider-oci RPMs to easily get going without downloading anything elsewhere.
• Integration of Oracle Linux yum servers inside Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for fast and easy access with no external network traffic charges.

So you can find his blog here.

We just recently released a new Software Collections update on our yum server.

SCL 3.0 in the Software Collections yum repo:

On Oracle Linux 7 this adds maven 3.5, nginx 1.12, nodejs8, php7.1 and python 3.6 and the usual updates to other developer packages.

Updates in the Oracle Linux 7 Developer repo:

We released the latest updates of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure python SDK (1.3.14) and CLI (2.4.16) (using the python SDK). This makes it very, very easy to install the tools needed.

We updated the terraform OCI provider to 2.0.7.

Tons of updates in the Oracle Linux 7 EPEL repo. Too many to list here though. We now have over 10000 RPMs in the EPEL repo.

As a reminder:

You can keep up to date with new RPMs we add on a daily basis by looking at our yum what's new page. (sneak preview: we're going to also add an announce mail list for those that prefer email over webpages).

Keep in mind that we have added many new yum repositories of late, so if you have an existing install, consider updating your yum repo file or at least go look at the https://yum.oracle.com pages to see which repos are new. 

latest ol7 yum repo file

OL7 yum page

We just updated the Oracle Linux 7 for ARM64 content.

Oracle Linux 7 for ARM64 (64-bit only) is freely downloadable from OTN: here.

The release is now at the same level as x64 (Oracle Linux 7 update 4)

The ARM64 yum repositories are also updated with the latest content. Keep in mind that we have a devtool set release for ARM as well.

Two important features on the latest ARM ISO:

- first preview of UEK5. (Linux kernel 4.14.14+) as the default kernel

- gcc 7.2 and gcc 7.3 are included on the ISO (and in the yum repo) to have easy and free access to latest gcc for ARM64

Remember that our ARM port is a preview release, it's for test and development only, it's not a GA supported product today however it's on par with x64 in terms of packages and it's completely free to download and use. No need to get a vendor auth code or whatever others out there have.

Busy news day!

We just updated our docker-engine rpm to version 17.12. As always you can find it in the Oracle Linux 7 preview channel on our yum server.

docker-engine-17.12.0.ol-1.0.1.el7.x86_64.rpm

We are currently cooking/baking "Oracle Container Services for Use with Kubernetes 1.9.1" stay tuned for that one as well.

oh and look for the docker-engine RPM on ARM soon too.

We recently added another little utilities RPM for Oracle Linux 7 to our collection:

oci-utils is an Oracle Linux RPM that contains a set of scripts to make managing an OCI instance easier, from within the instance.

The current version provides tools that help with managing block volumes (attach, remove, automatic discovery), secondary vnic configuration, a script to query the public IP of an instances and a script that lets you query instance metadata key/value pairs without having to parse or read json.

<attach a 50G block volume in the OCI webconsole>

# oci-iscsi-config -s Currently attached iSCSI devices: Target iqn.2015-12.com.oracleiaas:31b78e27-0c73-43ff-98b9-0ced1722a08c Persistent portal: 169.254.2.2:3260 Current portal: 169.254.2.2:3260 State: running Attached device: sdb Size: 50G File system type: Unknown Mountpoint: Not mounted Target iqn.2015-02.oracle.boot:uefi Persistent portal: 169.254.0.2:3260 Current portal: 169.254.0.2:3260 State: running Attached device: sda Size: 46.6G Partitions: Device Size Filesystem Mountpoint sda1 544M vfat /boot/efi sda2 8G swap [SWAP] sda3 38G xfs /

You can see /dev/sdb now show up after a few seconds, without having to run any commands.

oci-network-config is similar

oci-network-config is similar # oci-network-config -s CONFIG ADDR SPREFIX SBITS VIRTRT NS IND IFACE VLTAG VLAN STATE MAC VNIC - 10.0.0.2 10.0.0.0 24 10.0.0.1 - 0 ens3 - - UP 02:00:17:01:ed:6b ocid1.vnic.oc1.iad.abuwcljs4ik52qrq7itbb32rwajjqddt7utla64t47fkkq7tebw5gknt5csa <add a secondary interface>
# oci-network-config -s CONFIG ADDR SPREFIX SBITS VIRTRT NS IND IFACE VLTAG VLAN STATE MAC VNIC - 10.0.0.2 10.0.0.0 24 10.0.0.1 - 0 ens3 - - UP 02:00:17:01:ed:6b ocid1.vnic.oc1.iad.abuwcljs4ik52qrq7itbb32rwajjqddt7utla64t47fkkq7tebw5gknt5csa ADD 10.0.0.3 10.0.0.0 24 10.0.0.1 - 1 ens4 - - UP 02:00:17:01:eb:53 ocid1.vnic.oc1.iad.abuwcljsxek2mqaotafcohdmvghzrzx3jiiwq3zo45fh65dvlkpinndfjvma oci-public-ip just contacts an internet facing server to return your public IP of your instance.

# oci-public-ip Public IP address: 129.213.44.98
oci-medata let's you pretty-print the instance metadata and query for a given key

# oci-metadata -g region Instance details: Region: iad (Ashburn, VA, USA) # oci-metadata -g state Instance details: Instance state: Running

An updated version in the near future will also use the SDK (if installed along with your pem key) to go and create a block device and attach it from within your instance and/or create a secondary vnic and automatically create and attach it.

One roadmap item is the ability to use dynamic groups and principals to allow for an instance with the right privileges to do the block volume create/secondary vnic create without a pem key.

give it a try.

We just published an initial preview version of our next kernel-uek. This is based on upstream Linux 4.14 (latest stable -14). UEK4 is/was based on a 4.1 upstream Linux kernel.

If you want to try it out, you can just add the yum repo below on your  Oracle Linux 7-based system. If you don't have a quick OL7 environment, remember you can sign up for a free account on Oracle Cloud and quickly create an Oracle Linux 7 instance and do exactly the same.

There will be very regular updates of this preview kernel going forward so you can remain up to date with our development efforts. The source code is there as well and we are going to push the git repos onto github/oracle soon(ish).

All you have to do is add the following to your /etc/yum.repos.d/public-yum-ol7.repo file.

and then upgrade your kernel

reboot and you are all set.

If you want the latest dtrace along with it, it's in the same repo, you can just do

Just as FYI -

latest update of uek5 preview is on https://yum.oracle.com

Oracle Linux 7 Server - Developer preview Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5

kernel-uek-4.14.20-1.el7uek - The Linux kernel (Update)

This update has a bunch of fixes from us (typically see that with changelog entries containing "orabug" and it pulls in gregkh's stable 4.14.20 tree on top of 4.14.11.

Remember - go check http://yum.oracle.com/whatsnew.html on a regular basis, good source to see what's been updated or added.