TECH.kulish.com

This is the first part in a series of notes taken regarding new(ish) Solaris 10 technologies. Other items I have notes on are ZFS and new service administration.

Zones, Containers, Domains and Partition (According to Sun):

Zone: chroot’d virtual machine. Some resources are shared, for example, the kernel or /usr/lib.
More info below.

Container: Zone with resource controls in place. At this time, limited to number of CPUs.
See “Resource Pools”

Domain: Grouping of hardware in enterprise class Sun servers

Partition: Segregation of domain grouped hardware.

Non-Global Zones (NGZ) can either be Sparse Root Model (/lib, /platform, /sbin, and /usr are linked from the Global Zone) or the Whole Root Model

Monitoring Zones:
prstat -Z show cpu/mem utilization on zones (including Global
rcapstat monitor memory caps
poolcfg -dc info get info on pools
zoneadm list -iv list zones and show status
zonecfg -z info show info on a zone

Resource Allocation (Resource Capping Daemon):
pooladm -e save active pool config in /etc/pooladm.conf
pooladm -x removes all user configured pools
projadd and projmod to limit memory

Zone creation and destruction:
zonecfg -z to configure zones
zoneadm -z uninstall uninstalls a zone (configuration is left intact)
zonecfg -z delete removes zone configuration completely (make backups)
zoneadm -z install install zone (copy files)

Zone Interaction (From the Global Zone):
zlogin -C virtual serial console
zlogin -S send command to zone w/o login
zoneadm -z boot boot the zone
zoneadm -z [halt | reboot]

Miscellaneous Zone Stuff:
/etc/zones contains data on all configured zones
Dynamic resource pools allow limiting of resources a zone can use
~. disconnect from virtual console (may blow you completely out)
~~. to disconnect from virtual console (use this if the above doesn’t work correctly)
NGZ’s cannot be an NFS Server currently.

Some of the resource management comments may seem to contradict each other. I will clarify these statements as I implement resource controls.