HOWTO: Install SAP Sybase ASE 15.x and Linux Containers (LXC) – Ubuntu Server 13.04

Requirements:

Host OS:

• Ubuntu Server 13.04 x86-64 (64bit)
• At least 4GB RAM
• 300GB available disk space

Sybase Patches:

• If you’re going to run 32bit SQL Anywhere (or an embedded RSSD with Replication Server), you need to apply a SQL Anywhere patch: http://search.sybase.com/kbx/changerequests?bug_id=694479

Install LXC and the bridge-utils to support a network bridge:

aptitude install lxc debootstrap bridge-utils

Create the network bridge br0:

cd /etc/network

Edit interfaces:
replace:

  auto eth0
  iface eth0 inet dhcp

with:

  # LXC bridge
  auto br0
  iface br0 inet dhcp
      bridge_ports eth0
      bridge_stp off
      bridge_fd 0
      bridge_maxwait 0

  auto eth0
  iface eth0 inet manual

Restart networking:

service networking restart

Create lxc-default-sybase Apparmor profile:

cd /etc/apparmor.d/lxc
cp lxc-default lxc-default-sybase

Edit lxc-default-sybase:
replace:

  profile lxc-container-default flags=(attach_disconnected,mediate_deleted) {

with:

  profile lxc-container-default-sybase flags=(attach_disconnected,mediate_deleted) {

replace/add only if using you’re using LXC version LOWER than 0.7.5-3ubuntu60 – see LXC bug 1021411:

   deny @{PROC}/sys/kernel/** wklx,

with:

   deny @{PROC}/sys/kernel/(^shm)** wklx,

Update the kernel with the new lxc-default-sybase profile

apparmor_parser -r /etc/apparmor.d/lxc-containers

Replace /etc/lxc/lxc.conf with:

lxc.network.type=veth
lxc.network.link=br0
lxc.network.flags=up

# cap the memory available to the container
lxc.cgroup.memory.limit_in_bytes = 2G

Assuming that volume group VG02 exists, let’s create the container with the name of “sybase”, and a logical volume of 100G using the xfs file system:

lxc-create -n sybase -t ubuntu -B lvm --lvname sybase --vgname VG02 --fstype xfs --fssize 100G

Before we start the ‘sybase’ container, we need to update the container configuration to use the lxc-container-default-sybase container:

cd /var/lib/lxc/sybase

Edit config:
replace:

  #lxc.aa_profile = unconfined

with:

  lxc.aa_profile = lxc-container-default-sybase

We’re ready to start the container in console mode (to start it as a daemon add -d):

lxc-start -n sybase

The default login credentials are ubuntu / ubuntu

Let’s switch to root so we can install the packages to support Sybase ASE 15.7:

sudo su - root

Enable up to 512MB of shared memory:

echo "kernel.shmmax = 536870912" >> /etc/sysctl.conf
sysctl -p

Install the packages (nmon is a great os monitoring tool but if you don’t want it, don’t include it):

dpkg --add-architecture i386
apt-get update
apt-get install ia32-libs
apt-get install aptitude libaio1 xauth ia32-libs libstdc++5 nmon ncompress

If you want to install PPA repositories:

apt-get install python-software-properties

We need to set up the locale:

locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
echo 'LANG="en_US.UTF-8"' > /etc/default/locale

Copy the sybase software to your new Linux Container and extract it into a temporary directory.

Because Ubuntu seems to think that gzip can uncompress files compressed with the ‘compress’ command (it really can’t btw), you need to alias the uncompress with /usr/bin/uncompress.real:

alias uncompress='/usr/bin/uncompress.real'

From here, you would install and configure Sybase ASE 15.x as you normally would.

Determine ip address for eth0:

ifconfig|grep "inet addr"

In my case, the eth0 ip address is 192.168.0.115. You will either want to reserve this address with your DHCP server or setup a static ip in /etc/interfaces.

Assuming we want to keep the 192.168.0.115 address for this container, we need to modify the /etc/hosts file:
Replace:

  127.0.0.1 localhost sybase

with:

  127.0.0.1 localhost
  192.168.0.115 sybase