Solaris 11 Advanced Administration

Course review:

This 5-day course follows on from the Solaris 11 System Administration course, and covers advanced areas of administration such as Zones, automated installs, virtual networks, IP multipathing, role-based access control, system backup and restore, advanced ZFS topics and more.

The course is run using SPARC systems, with fully detailed Intel examples and supplement provided. (See topic list below). This course provides training to a level needed for the Oracle Certified Professional Oracle Solaris 11 System Administrator exam 1Z0-822; for full details of the Solaris certifications, click here: Solaris Certification. .

Course Objectives:

• Configure and manage local IPS release and support repositories.
• Manage boot environments with beadm and package commands.
• Automate Solaris 11 operating system installs using the Automated Installer, including conversion of Solaris 10 Jumpstart rules and profiles.
• Manage application data storage using ZFS dataset properties, including restores and system recovery.
• Configure and manage virtual networks in Solaris 11, with resource controls.
• Perform advanced Configuration of zones, including resource controls and virtual networks.
• Configure new SMF services.
• Understand and configure privileges; identify privilege aware commands.
• Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) with Profiles, authorisations and privileges.
• Ensure security of system resources with auditing facilities.
• Monitor and manage systems processes and priorities.
• Control system resource configuration, and performance monitoring.
• Control system messaging and log rotation.
• Configure process and system crash and dump facilities.

Course Topics: Managing the Image Packaging System (IPS) repositories and publishers

• Configure local IPS release and support (Oracle Solaris updates) repositories.
• Access and install Oracle key and certificate files to authorise support repository downloads.
• Configure client access to the local IPS server repositories.
• Signed packages and other package properties.
• Administering IPS package publishers.
• Managing multiple Boot Environments (BE), with facilities in the pkg and beadm commands.

Automating Solaris 11 installation of multiple systems

• Automated Installation of Solaris 11 using the Automated Installer (AI) on SPARC and Intel systems.
• Creating AI manifests and packages, plus client configuration profiles.
• Building a custom Solaris image using the distribution constructor.

Configuring ZFS for Business Application Data

• Configuring data redundancy with mirrored and RAIDz Storage Pools.
• Backup and restore with ZFS snapshots, send and receive, including full OS backup and restore.
• Advanced ZFS dataset properties.
• ZFS failure and recovery scenarios.
• Sharing data with NFS (Network File System), including server and client configuration.
• Configuring basic CIFS (Common Internet File System, a.k.a. SMB) shares.
• Introduction to the CIFS client-side in Solaris 11.

Configuring Network and Implement Network Failover

• Local network configuration; static and dynamic network profiles.
• Using NetWork Auto-Magic (NWAM) for automatic network configuration.
• Using link aggregations for failover and extra bandwidth.
• Implementing network link failover using IPMP (Internet Protocol Multi-Pathing).
• Creating, configuring and monitoring an IPMP Group.
• Testing failover.

Configuring Virtual Network, including Zones.

• Creating and configuring a virtual network interfaces (VNICs).
• Configuring VNICs in zones.
• Resources configuration in a zone.
• Managing VNIC resources.

Managing Systems Services and Service Properties in the SMF (Service Management facility)

• Creating and configuring SMF services.
• SMF properties and how to use them.
• Troubleshooting and recovering failed SMF services.

Configuring Privileges and Role-Based Access Control, and the sudo command

• Configuring and Using RBAC (Role Based Access Control).
• Assign rights profiles and Authorisations to users.
• Configure new rights profiles.
• Create Administrative Roles, and assign rights.
• Understand and configure privileges; identify privilege aware commands.
• Assign privileges to users and roles.
• Configure and use the sudo command.

Using Solaris Auditing to monitor and record user actions.

• Implementing, configuring and enabling auditing.
• Using and understanding audit data generated by the audit system.

Managing Processes and Scheduling Priorities

• Overview of process scheduling features.
• Configuring process scheduling priority.
• Enabling the Fair Share Scheduler (FSS).
• Configure the scheduling class of a zone.

Basic System Resource controls

• System Resource principles.
• Monitoring System Performance.
• Examples of system resource control commands.
• Project creation and project parameters.

Monitoring and Troubleshooting Process and System Failures

• Configuring system messaging (syslog).
• Managing log rotation tasks.
• Controlling process and system crash dumps, i.e. core files and kernel panic dumps.