[H-GEN] Solaris zones/chroot/vmware

[James McPherson - PTS Engineer]

Adrian Sutton wrote:
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Hello Solaris type people!

Oi! I resemble that remark! .....

> I'm looking into ways that we can improve our integrations development 
> and make it more efficiently.  What this effectively entails is that we 
> need to install and run a wide range of enterprise software (Oracle, 
> Vignette, Stellent, Documentum, etc).  Generally we only work on one 
> integration at a time and thus need only Stellent OR Vignette but not 
> both at the same time, however in the future we may need to be able to 
> have a couple such systems running at once.  The load on any of these 
> servers however is extremely light (single user) and we have previously 
> been running them on Celeron 700's or SunBlade 100s.  That's been a 
> little slow but bearable.
> What we'd like to do is set up virtual machines so that we can easily 
> boot the particular setup we need, store setups for later and isolate 
> the various systems so we don't break stuff.


If you want Zones (N1 Grid Containers if you want to talk
to a marketroid) then you'll need Solaris 10. Currently
available via Solaris Express (www.sun.com/software/solaris)
as a free download. (If you want the privilege of logging
bugs with Sun then we'll charge you some money ;>)

If you're happy with chroot then you can do that in Solaris 8
or 9. Ditto with vmware.

There is also qemu http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ which
you can use for multiple different OS versions. I'm running
it at home on my amd64/Solaris10 machine with a WindowsXP
image (yes, I do have a license key!) and a FreeBSD image.
There are screenshots at
http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/screenshots.html and
http://wiki.osdev.info/?qemu/Screenshots

There's been some discussion inside Sun about the benefits
of qemu -- means we can run a Solaris8 or Solaris9 image
on our boxen which we run Solaris10 on -- great for debugging
kernel issues.

> We currently have a Sun e250 running Solaris 8 (uname -a reports: SunOS 
> canine 5.8 Generic_108528-15 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-250) which is under 
> very light load but is running a couple of critical web-apps that we 
> need to make sure aren't disturbed.
> Noone in the office has any worthwhile knowledge of Solaris but getting 
> in a consultant for a short period would be an option.
> Any thoughts on what options are available to us?  Also useful would be 
> suggestions on how to go about investigating how effective the solution 
> would be and how to practice going through the setup (using some of the 
> SunBlade 100s that are lying around is a definite option).

Your kernel patch is about 20 revs behind and more than 18
months old. This is bad. Very bad. I understand why you might
not have patched the system, but you do need to take into
account what you're missing out on. You can get the current
patch cluster for Solaris 8 from sunsolve.sun.com (and you
do have a support contract, don't you?)


[now I'm wearing my "spruik Solaris 10" hat]

Apart from that you should definitely be getting your
app(s) running on Solaris 10 -- use the zones and use
dtrace to see what your code is spending its time doing.
Oh, and Solaris10 boots a _lot_ faster than Solaris 8 or
9 -- something like 2x faster is what I've personally
experienced, and it's getting faster all the time.

If you want an idea of how many zones you can run on a
sunblade100, check out John Clingan's blog at
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jclingan and in particular
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jclingan/20041201


[hat off]

Feel free to contact me directly.

cheers,
James C. McPherson
--
Pacrim PTS Engineer            828 Pacific Highway
                                Gordon NSW
Sun Microsystems Australia     2072