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Fast Track to Solaris 10 Adoption: Solaris Grid ContainersCompatibility IssuesPlease click on a question below or download a pdf version.
A: The Sun Cluster team and the zones team are working together to make sure that Sun Cluster and zones will work together seamlessly. A: In the current Software Express releases, zones need to be uninstalled in order to use LU to upgrade the system. This is being addressed currently, and LU will be the mechanism by which zones themselves are upgraded. A: We haven't tested the Sun PC card inside a zone yet, but it should be possible. We will work on testing this soon. A: Yes, this is supported on upgrade. Q: Will the Solaris 10 OS support Sun PCI (personal computer cards)? A: Yes. A: If you're using zones, all containers have the same OS level, so you cannot use it for this purpose. However, Sun Domains, which is available on some of our servers, does support the ability to run multiple OS releases on the same machine. Q: Does Solaris Grid Container technology run Fortran apps in containers, and does it perform well? A: Yes, there's no difference in the application environment, so Fortran apps will run as well as C, C++, Java code, Perl, etc. There's no performance difference between running within a zone and running "natively" (aside from any overhead due to sharing resources with other apps running on the same system). A: The main benefits of containers would apply: resource isolation, security isolation, and hardware fault isolation. Depending on your site's requirements, containers may also simplify administration, make resource accounting easier, and drive higher levels of hardware utilization by making consolidation simpler. Q: How does Solaris Grid Containers interact with the DFS? A: We're still working out the details of how these will best be integrated. At minimum, this will work like any other file system; the global zone administrator will configure storage and determine which file systems are available in a given zone. We'd also like to allow a global zone administrator to assign a pool of storage to a zone, letting the zone administrator decide how to carve that into file systems. Since DFS is still under development, we're not sure how much of this will be available initially. Q: Can you use "Flash Archive" with zones? A: Not at the current time, but this is something we may support in the future. Q: Does Veritas Clustering work in the Solaris 10 OS? If not, when will it work? A: Veritas is a key Sun ISV partner, and we are working with them on the Solaris 10 OS. We cannot commit them to any roadmap for their products, but we would expect in general that their products will be available around our general availability date. Q: Do products such as Veritas VxVM/VxFS play well with containers? A: VxVM/VxFS can be configured in the global zone, and then zones can use the resulting file systems. This is the recommended strategy in general with volume managers like Solaris Volume Manager and VxVM. A: Looking at it first from a broad view, if you have an application that runs on the Solaris 8 OS, it should work on the Solaris 10 OS. Caveats in this area would be if you're doing something seriously out of bounds, such as directly trolling through kernel memory or using other types of undocumented interfaces, but even then the odds are high that what you're doing will continue to work. Looking specifically at containers, the rule of thumb is that unprivileged programs should work in a container with no problem. Apps that need root privileges may need to consider whether certain functions need to run from the global zone, or whether they're candidates for consolidation at all. Also, the new Solaris OS privilege model may make it possible for apps that used to need root access to run at a lower privilege level and thus run in a container successfully. Q: Can Zones be upgraded using LU? A: In the current Solaris Express release, upgrading a zone via Live Upgrade is not yet supported. However, this is coming; in fact, Live Upgrade will be the primary upgrade mechanism for zones. A: Most third-party software (excluding kernel software, such as file systems and volume managers) will just work in a zone; the standard application environment is unchanged. We're working with vendors who represent exceptions to this rule (e.g., Veritas) to make sure they have versions of their software that works with containers. A: Containers and domains are very complementary; you can use containers within a domain to further isolate applications and obtain an even finer level of granularity. The combination of containers and domains on a system like the F15K would give you the ability to create more than 100,000 separate application environments. Q: Is there full Solaris Grid Container support for AMD Opteron processor-based systems? A: The roadmap of supporting Solaris Grid Containers is the same for the UltraSPARC and AMD Opteron-based platforms. Q: Does Sun Cluster 3 work with Solaris Grid Containers? A: We're working on this; support for containers should be ready in an update to SC 3.1. A: Each zone can have one or more IP addresses assigned to it. When a zone boots, the system will automatically "plumb" logical interfaces that use a given physical adapter. So, no, multiple network adapters are not required, but they can be used. A: We're getting a very enthusiastic response from software vendors, especially because of technologies such as zones and DTrace, and some of the very significant performance gains we're seeing. Cadence announced their endorsement of the Solaris 10 OS back in February. A: We're consolidating and integrating these features over time. Resource management (formerly provided by an unbundled product, SRM) is now part of the Solaris OS as of the Solaris 9 OS. The grid containers functionality is similarly an integral part of the Solaris 10 OS. Other parts of the Solaris Grid Container product suite (e.g., the Solaris Grid Container Service Provisioning software) is separate, but we're working on tightly integrating these so that, for example, the service provisioning software knows how to configure containers. Q: Is no_exec_user_stack available for x86, and can it also restrict exec in zones? A: no_exec_user_stack is a global tunable. It affects all zones on a system and currently is not settable per-zone. Intel systems do not support this feature, although AMD64-based systems should support it when AMD64 support is available.
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