Ludo Sketches

The OpenDS development team is very please to announce the release of OpenDS 1.0.0, the first stable release of the OpenDS project.

OpenDS 1.0.0 delivers a fully compliant LDAPv3 server (*) that passes all of the compliance, interoperability and security tests suites. Furthermore, OpenDS 1.0.0 implements most the standard and experimental LDAP extensions defined in the IETF as RFCs or Internet-Drafts, ensuring maximum interoperability with LDAP client applications.

With a limited footprint allowing the server to be embedded in other Java applications, OpenDS has a very rich set of APIs making it easy to extend and increase usage scope.

OpenDS also supports a multi-master replication model that guarantees the high availability of the data for all operations, searches or updates. While theorically unlimited with regards to the number of masters, the OpenDS 1.0.0 server has been stressed under heavy and durable load with 4 Masters.

OpenDS 1.0.0 also includes :

– A 6 steps graphical installation tool that allows to have a server configured, up and running in less than 3 minutes.

– A graphical status panel

– A rich command line tool to perform all online administrative tasks both interactively or scripted.

– Advance security and password policies

– Advance backup and restore capabilities.

– A DSML gateway servlet.

– A complete user documentation set.

Note that the defaults settings for the OpenDS server are targeted for the initial evaluator or developer, running on a machine with a limited amount of resources. So it is important to do initial tuning of the Java VM and the OpenDS server to scale.

The first recommendation is to use the latest version of the Java VM (as of today Java 6 update 6 aka 1.6.0_06).

Some recommendations for the Java VM settings have been published on the OpenDS Documentation Wiki. More specifically, in order to have constant performance, tuning the Garbage Collector is needed. We recommend the CMS GC or ParallelGC.

Finally, OpenDS does provide better performances when the database files are cached into memory. The initial size for the DB cache is 10% of the heap size and is definitely under sized. A good rule of thumb is to allocated a DB cache size about half of the heap size if the later is below or equal to 2 GB, and for heap size greater than 2 GB to allocate a DB cache size equal to the heap size minus 1GB.

While we are really happy with the first stable release of the OpenDS LDAP directory server, our roadmap includes many other features and some ambitious ones:

– Native packages for OpenSolaris and Linux.

– Transactions for LDAP

– Assured Replication which is a replication model where a changed is assured to be received on at least 2 masters before it get acknowledge to the client application.

– Access to the log of changes over LDAP in order to provide external synchronization services.

– Basic management GUI for the most common tasks.

– Confidentiality and Encryption negotiation through SASL

– Improved performances

…

For the more information about OpenDS 1.0.0 please check the release notes.

Support for OpenDS 1.0.0 will be soon available from Sun Microsystems.

(*) with the exception of a partial support of RFC 4518 – International String Preparation

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