Sun OpenDS ^TM Standard Edition (SE) 2.2 is an updated version of newest member of the Sun Directory Server family of products. It includes an LDAP core that is designed for easy installation, embedding, and configuration as well as a new Directory Proxy Server for load-balancing, high availability and data distribution.

Sun OpenDS SE 2.2 is a high-performance, highly-extensible, pure Java directory server that delivers a fully compliant LDAPv3 server that passes all of the compliance, interoperability and security tests suites. Furthermore, Sun OpenDS SE 2.2 implements most of 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.

Sun OpenDS SE 2.2 also supports a multi-master replication model with optional assured replication that guarantees the high availability of the data for all operations, searches or updates. While theoretically unlimited with regards to the number of masters, the Sun OpenDS SE 2.2 server has been stressed under heavy and durable load with 8 Masters.

This 2.2 version significantly increases performance both in read and write, making it one of the most efficient commercial directory servers available.

Sun OpenDS SE 2.0 includes:

• A 6 step graphical installation tool that allows to have a server configured, up and running in less than 3 minutes.
• An advanced graphical control panel that helps to lower total cost of ownership by empowering directory administrators in user, schema and indexes management.
• A rich command line tool to perform all online administrative tasks both interactively or scripted.
• New assured replication capability.
• Advance security and password policies.
• Advance backup and restore capabilities.
• User Interface localized in simplified Chinese, French, German, Japanese & Spanish
• A complete user documentation set.

Sun OpenDS SE 2.2 brings in addition:

• Enhanced graphical control panel to manage local and remote server, data and schema
• Support for fractional replication, to specify which attributes have to be replicated
• Optimization to support import of large LDIF files and to rebuild indexes for large number of entries
• Feature to publish changes to an external changelog
• A new Proxy server to handle load-balancing, highly-available configurations, data-distribution with a global index.
• An updated “Namefinder” as a sample applications

Note that the default settings for the Sun OpenDS SE 2.2 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 Sun OpenDS SE server to scale. The first recommendation is to use the latest version of the Java VM (as of today Java 6 update 16 aka 1.6.0_16).

Some recommendations for the Java VM settings have been published on the Sun OpenDS SE 2.2 Documentation http://docs.sun.com/source/821-0506/tuning-performance.html. More specifically, in order to have constant performance, tuning the Garbage Collector is needed. We recommend the CMS GC or ParallelGC. Finally, Sun OpenDS SE 2.2 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.

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