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Zone Enhancements in Solaris Container Manager

Raghuraman Sesharaman, Navin Kumar, and Amol Chiplunkar; October 2007

This document explains the new zone enhancements made in Solaris Container Manager. This document has tasks that focusses only on the new zone enhancements included in the zone wizard and does not explain the entire zone wizard.

Zone Enhancements in Solaris Container Manager

This document is intended for IT managers, system administrators, and architects in organizations using or planning to use this product. The article assumes that readers are familiar with the installation, setup, and use of the software.

Solaris Container Manager is an integral part of Sun Management Center 4.0 software and is shipped with Sun Management Center as an add-on product. Solaris Container Manager works in a browser-based console to manage software containers, and helps maximize resource utilization and increase data center productivity.

The Solaris Container Manager software organizes existing resource management utilities that run on the Solaris 8, Solaris 9, and Solaris 10 Operating System. This release aggregates changes from Solaris Container Manager 3.6 and 3.6.1, along with additional feature enhancements.

The Solaris Container Manager software provides the ability to control resource management for use by each software application. This control is especially useful in implementing server consolidation in your data center. Server consolidation produces the following benefits:

• Maximizes the number of applications that can run on your servers, so that your computer resources are not wasted

• Reduces the number of servers in your data center, which simplifies management

You can access container management features from the web console of Sun Management Center 4.0.

Zone Enhancements Features

Solaris Container Manager provides additional zone management features that are implemented in Solaris 10 8/07.

The features are described in the following sections:

• Managing Branded Zones

• Assigning Dedicated CPUs to a Zone

• Assigning CPU Shares to a Zone

• Assigning Memory to a Zone

• Defining User Attributes

To Navigate to the New Zone Wizard

1. In the left pane of the Sun Management Center main window, select Manage Solaris Containers.
2. (Optional) Click Hosts Root.
3. (Optional) Click a group name.
4. Select a host name.
5. Click the Zones tab.
6. Click the New Zone button.

   The New Zone wizard appears. To display help text about each wizard step, click the Help tab in the wizard pane.

Managing Branded Zones

The branded zones facility in the Solaris Operating System is a simple extension of Solaris Zones. The branded zone (BrandZ) framework extends the Solaris Zones infrastructure. The branded zone (BrandZ) framework enables you to create non-global zones that contain non-native operating environments used for running applications. All brand management is performed through extensions to the current zones structure.

For more information about branded zones, see System Administration Guide: Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Solaris Zones.

To Create a Branded Zone

1. Navigate to the New Zone Wizard.

   The New Zone wizard appears.

2. Work through the wizard to reach the step "Provide zone creation attributes".



Figure 1: Branded Zones Screen
(Click to Enlarge)

3. Choose lx from the Zone Brand drop-down list.

   The lx value for zone brand is available only on Solaris 10 8/07 x64 systems.

   The zone brand determines the scripts that are executed when a zone is installed and booted and identifies the correct application type at application launch time. The possible values of zone brand are:

   • Native - Specifies that the zone contains the same operating environment as the parent host.

   • lx - Specifies that the zone contains a Linux environment.

4. Type the image path and install arguments and click Next.
5. Specify the system configuration file.

   This file is required to provide the attributes that are required for zone management. You need to create this file and specify the location here.

Assigning Dedicated CPUs to a Zone

You can assign dedicated CPUs directly to a zone. When the zone requests a specific number or range of CPUs, the system creates a temporary resource pool with the name SUNWtmp_zonename. The temporary resource pool assigns these CPUs to the zone. When the zone shuts down, the resource pool releases these CPUs.

To Assign Dedicated CPUs to a Zone

You can assign dedicated CPUs to a zone only on Solaris 10 8/07.

1. Navigate to the New Zone Wizard.

   The New Zone wizard appears.

2. Work through the wizard to reach the step "Select a Resource Pool".
3. Select the Enabled check box for dedicated CPU allocation.
4. Type the number or range of CPUs in the Number of CPU or Range field.

   For example, type 3 or 1-5.

Figure 2: Dedicated CPUs Allocation Screen
(Click to Enlarge)

Assigning CPU Shares to a Zone

You can assign the number of CPU shares that you want for a zone.

To Assign CPU Shares to a Zone

The two types of schedulers at the zone level are:

• Fair Share Scheduler - Tries to control the allocation of available CPU resources among workloads, based on their importance. This importance is expressed by the number of shares of CPU resources that you assign to each workload.

• Time Share Scheduler - Tries to provide every process relatively equal access to the available CPUs, allocating CPU time based on priority. It should be used if CPU allocation is not required.

For more information about schedulers, see System Administration Guide: Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Solaris Zones.

Note - You can assign CPU shares to a zone only if you select Fair Share Scheduler as the type of scheduler.

1. Navigate to the New Zone Wizard.

   The New Zone wizard appears.

2. Work through the wizard to reach the step "Provide CPU Shares Attributes".
3. Type the number of CPU shares in the CPU Shares field.

Figure 3: CPU Shares Allocation Screen
(Click to Enlarge)

To Change CPU Shares for a Zone

You cannot change the number of CPU shares in the global zone.

1. In the left pane of the Sun Management Center main window, select Manage Solaris Containers.
2. (Optional) Click Hosts Root.
3. (Optional) Click a group name.
4. Click a host name.
5. Click a resource pool name.
6. Click a zone name.
7. Click the Properties tab.
8. Type a new integer value in the CPU Shares field.
9. Click the Save button.

Assigning Memory to a Zone

You can assign the amount of memory that you want for a zone.

The following memory assignments to a zone are possible.

To Assign Memory to a Zone

When you create a zone, you can assign memory to it.

1. Navigate to the New Zone Wizard.

   The New Zone wizard appears.

2. Work through the wizard to reach the step "Specify memory configuration".
3. Specify the memory requirements for this zone.
   1. Type the amount of physical memory you want for this zone in the Physical Memory field.
   2. Type the amount of memory assigned to use as swap space in the Maximum Swap field.
   3. Type the amount of locked memory in the Locked Memory field.
   4. Type the amount of shared memory in the Shared Memory field.

To Change Memory Assignments for a Zone

You can use this procedure if you have not assigned memory requirements during zone creation or if you want to change the memory requirements for the zone.

You can also change the physical memory, maximum swap, locked memory, shared memory, and resource pool for the global zone.

1. In the left pane of the Sun Management Center main window, select Manage Solaris Containers.
2. (Optional) Click Hosts Root.
3. (Optional) Click a group name.
4. Click a host name.
5. Click a resource pool name.
6. Click a zone name.
7. Click the Properties tab.
8. Change the memory assignments for this zone.

   

   Figure 4: Memory Modifications Screen
   (Click to Enlarge)

   1. To change the amount of physical memory assigned to a zone, type a new integer value in the Physical Memory field.
   2. To change the amount of memory assigned to use as swap space, type a new integer value in the Swap Memory field.
   3. To change the amount of locked memory, type a new integer value in the Locked Memory field.
   4. To change the amount of memory that can be shared, type a new integer value in the shared Memory field.
9. Click the Save button.

Defining User Attributes

User-defined attributes are name-value pairs that are specific to the new zone and that remain when the zone is rebooted. For example, you might create an attribute to configure an audio device for a branded zone or an attribute to count the number of times the zone was rebooted.

For additional information, see the zonecfg(1M) man page.

To Define User Attributes

You can define user attributes only for branded zones.

1. Navigate to the New Zone Wizard.

   The New Zone wizard appears.

2. Work through the wizard to reach the step "User Defined Attributes".
3. Click the New button to enter attributes to be configured.
4. Type a name, value and type for attribute on respective fields.

For More Information

For additional information about the features described in this article, see the following documents:

• System Administration Guide: Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Solaris Zones

• Sun Management Center and Solaris OS documents on docs.sun.com

For general information about zones, see the following documents:

• IT Management Hub on BigAdmin

• Enhancements in Solaris Container Manager 3.6.1

• Installing and Administering Solaris Container Manager 3.6.1 on docs.sun.com

Also, see the following resources:

• Support:

  • Sun Services and Solutions
  • SunSolve Online

• Discussions:

  • Developer Forums: Look under "Administration Tools - Sun Management Center"

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