Highlights

With the escalating costs of managing your vast networks of servers and software components, you're looking for new ways to reduce IT infrastructure costs and better manage service levels. Consolidating multiple applications onto a single system means changing the way they're deployed, and this can be a very expensive solution. And that's where Virtualization and Solaris Operating System comes in. Solaris Containers, part of a comprehensive offering of Sun virtualization technologies also including Logical Domains (LDoms), uses virtualization to allow you to maintain the one-application-per-server deployment model, while sharing hardware resources.

• Dynamically move or replicate applications to fit the changes of the business
• Lowers administrative costs by safely combining multiple applications on a single system
• Reduces conflicts among applications running on the same system by isolating them from one another
• Supports Predictive Self Healing to minimize fault propagation and unplanned downtime
• Enhances security by preventing unauthorized access and unintended intrusions
• Integrated with other ground breaking Solaris 10 features at no additional cost

Sun xVM

Sun's approach to simplify and optimize operation of the next-generation data center is Sun xVM, a family of technologies that address both the virtualization of individual servers, as well as the unified management of the physical and virtual aspects of the datacenter.

Sun's virtualization strategy simplifies management (of business, applications, and data) to improve ROI and business agility, optimize efficiency and utilization and cut costs by extending virtualization across the entire IT infrastructure—from desktops, servers, OS, appliances, storage and the network.

• Read the Feature Story
• Listen to the Sun's Virtualization Roadmap Audio (mp3)

Logical Domains (LDoms)

Sun's new server virtualization and partitioning technology for Sun CoolThreads servers, LDoms, enables you to run multiple OSs simultaneously on a single CoolThreads server, thereby better utilizing server capacity and increasing efficiency and ROI. Enhanced Solaris Containers functionality allows you to improve system utilization by enabling you to securely run multiple, software-isolated applications on a single system or a logic domain.

By leveraging the combined functionality of Solaris 10's Predictive Self Healing, Container and LDoms, you are provided with an extra layer of security that allows you to automatically recover from potentially catastrophic system problems. This breakthrough innovation is what makes the Solaris 10 OS on Sun Fire / SPARC Enterprise CoolThreads servers the clear choice for achieving higher utilization rates without compromising service levels, privacy or security.

• Download Logical Domains software

Solaris Containers

OS virtualization with Solaris Containers allows you to maintain the one-application-per-server deployment model while simultaneously sharing hardware resources. An integral part of the Solaris 10 Operating System, Solaris Containers isolate software applications and services using flexible, software-defined boundaries and allows many private execution environments to be created within a single instance of the Solaris 10 OS. Each environment has its own identity, separate from the underlying hardware, so it behaves as if it's running on its own system making consolidation simple, safe, and secure.

• Watch the Demo
• Learn How it Works
• White Paper: RDMS Server Consolidation with Solaris 10 Containers (PDF)
• Solaris Containers Demo
• Solaris Containers Data Sheet
• White Paper: Solaris Containers—Server Virtualization and Manageability
• Sun Blueprint: Working with Solaris Containers and the Solaris Service Manager (PDF)
• Sun Blueprint: Solaris Containers Technology Architecture Guide (PDF)
• Sun Blueprint: Application and Database Server Consolidation on the Sun Fire x4600 server using solaris containers (PDF)
• Sun Blueprint: Creating Self-Balancing Solutions with Solaris Containers (PDF)
• Sun Blueprint: Web Consolidation on the Sun Fire T1000 server using solaris containers (PDF)
• Sun Blueprint: Solaris Containers what they are and how to use them (PDF)
• Howto: Consolidating Servers and Applications with Solaris Containers
• Howto: How to move a Solaris Container
• Howto: How to manage systems with ZFS in Solaris Containers
• Howto: Eliminating Web Page Hijacking with Solaris 10 Security

Leverage Solaris Features

Solaris Containers is able to take advantage of the other technologies built into Solaris to make your environment even more cost effective and observable.

With Solaris 8 Containers and Solaris 9 Containers you can run Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 applications on the latest SPARC systems and Solaris 10 today. The entire environment of the original source system, either Solaris 8 or Solaris 9, is automatically captured and transferred to a Container running on the target Solaris 10 system.

Customers with legacy Solaris 8 or Solaris 9 environments can now run these applications on newer, more cost effective and more powerful Sun SPARC systems such as the CoolThreads and MSeries servers. One or many existing applications can be consolidated onto a single system reducing power, space, cooling, and support costs. These environments can then be transitioned to Solaris 10 over time while removing the dependency on Solaris 8 or Solaris 9 support.

Efficient Filesystem
The integration of Solaris Containers with ZFS allows multiple Solaris Containers to consume a minimal disk footprint by utilizing ZFS snapshots. The global administrator can also hand off ZFS disksets to the container administrator for example allowing them to create their own snapshots and clones.

Observability
Utilize the observability provided by DTrace within a container, now application developers are able to probe their applications allowing them to debug systemic problems that are difficult to diagnose using traditional debugging tools.

Network control
Utilizing IP Instances allows the option to dedicate a network port to a container. The container administrator now has control over the network port allowing in-container configuration of such things as IP address, routing table, and network device settings.

Secure the secure
Take advantage of Trusted Extensions, an advanced security feature which implements labels to protect your data and applications based on their sensitivity level, not just on who owns or runs them. Credit card information, classified data, and personal records remain secure, and they can't be accessed by or written to unauthorized sources.

Extend to do more
Solaris Containers for Linux Applications allow Linux applications to run unmodified on the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS). Enabling you to maximize consolidation of IT environments by allowing Linux and Solaris to coexist , increase flexibility by lowering the barrier to migrate, remove dependencies on unpredictable schedules and source code availability and also boost cross-platform development by extending the observability features of Solaris 10 to the Linux platform.

Sizing your Container

Solaris Containers can further enable customized security, performance or utilization requirements, through container sizing. IT managers and system administrators also have the ability to run a container bound to a specific set of CPUs. This ensures that applications assigned to these CPUs will have sole access to these resources.

Delegated authority model
Solaris 10 gives the main system administrator sole control to assign portions of a system's resources to specific isolated containers. While local administrators do not have global control, they do have control over the applications and environments within their assigned container.

Fine Tune Performance
By allowing systems administrators to assign a container to CPUs grouped on a single system board, Solaris 10 enables control over performance within the container due to the locality between CPUs and their memory resources.

Ease Usability
Solaris Containers allows you to more accurately recreate your physical system in the virtualized world by allowing simple, easy to configure CPU and memory resource management together with a specific network configuration. This makes the definition of a container easy allowing rapid definition and deployment of new containers without the need to go through a time consuming hardware purchase cycle.

Server Consolidation

A primary objective of the Solaris 10 Operating System design is to deliver tools that help you do more with less by consolidating your applications onto fewer systems. Solaris Containers allow administrators to create multiple virtual environments on a single system so applications can safely run without endangering each other. As a result, companies can better consolidate applications onto fewer servers without concern for resource constraints, fault propagation, or security, making consolidation simple, safe, and secure. Administrators also gain tight control over allocation of system and network resources, significantly improving resource utilization.

• White Paper: Consolidating Applications with Solaris Containers

Application Isolation

With Solaris Containers, each application runs in its own private, isolated environment—separate from the underlying hardware—virtually eliminating error propagation, unauthorized access, and unintentional intrusions among Solaris Containers. Providing a fine granularity of control, Solaris Containers enable administrators to ensure that all workloads have access to an appropriate amount of computing resources and that no workload is able to consume the entire system unless authorized to do so.

Because resources are isolated and dedicated to a Solaris Container and its applications rather than a complete system, highly efficient application consolidation is now possible. For example, Web servers typically listen to network port 80, and in order to do that they require root privileges, which entails a high security risk. To reduce these risks and run multiple Web servers per system, each Web server can run in a Solaris Container and listen to its own unique port 80, operating in an isolated and secure manner.

Rapid Application Deployment

Developing new applications and services—and getting them operational as quickly as possible—can be a critical success factor for any business. Solaris Containers can speed application deployment by enabling applications to be developed, tested, and deployed on a single server without fear that they will impact one another. Private container identities also make it possible to have multiple development versions of the same application on the same system. As a result, Solaris Containers can help lower costs by eliminating the need to purchase a new system for new releases or revisions. Multiple deployment scenarios can be tested with ease, and administrators can roll back to previous settings and configurations if needed.

In addition using the migration features of Solaris Containers (attach, detach and clone) it is now possible to rapidly create, test and deploy applications into a production environment not only reducing required downtime but also have in place, by default, a roll back strategy. A developer can now create an application in a container, harden it and hand off to the test team. The test engineer can test and verify the migrated container before handing over to the production team. Finally, the production administrator can duplicate and introduce the verified, hardened container into production. All done more rapidly that in a traditional non-virtualized environment and also with the minimum of disruption.

Application Availability

As an increasing number of applications are consolidated onto a single server, the potential exists for underlying hardware or complex software problems to negatively affect a much wider range of users and services than in the past. In the case of an underlying hardware problem, the Predictive Self Healing functionality in Solaris 10 has been specifically designed to work with Solaris Containers to automatically detect and mitigate hardware problems before they occur. In the event of a complex software issue causing system and application availability issues, DTrace technology has also been designed to be run either in a Solaris Container or across an entire system, giving system administrators the ability to determine the root cause of system issues as they happen in real time on production systems.