Re: Solaris 11 Zones Anyone?

This helps some with the terminology.

https://blogs.oracle.com/orasysat/entry/shall_i_use_zones_or


At OOW, they announced some additional innovation with the introduction of "Kernel Zones"

With kernel zones customers will have to option to run different kernel patch levels across different zones while maintaining the simplicity of zones management. We'll also be able to do live migration of kernel zones. All of that across HW platforms, i.e. kernel zones will be available on both SPARC as well as x86. Key benefits of kernel zones: 
x Low overhead (Lots of optimizations because we run Solaris on Solaris)
x Unique security features: Ability to make them immutable by locking down the root file system
x Integration with the Solaris resource management capabilities: CPU, memory, I/O, networking
x Fully compatible with OVM SPARC as well as native and S10 branded zones
x Comprehensive SDN capabilities: Distributed Virtual Switch and VxLAN capabilities 





________________________________
 From: Keith Moore <kmoore_at_zephyrus.com>
To: christopherdtaylor1994_at_gmail.com 
Cc: "oracle-l_at_freelists.org" <oracle-l_at_freelists.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, December 4, 2013 9:22 PM
Subject: Re: Solaris 11 Zones Anyone?
 


Yes, each zone is it's own separate environment. There is a global zone as well that in our environment the DBAs do not have access to. Different technologies but the end result is very similar to VMware or other virtualized environments. From within a zone you cannot see the other zones or even know they exist.

We are on Solaris 10 and have seen some weirdness where at low loads some utilities such as uptime and sar show results for the zone only (as they should) but under high load show results for the entire physical server. Don't know if that's been fixed in Solaris 11 or not.

Keith


On Dec 4, 2013, at 5:29 PM, Chris Taylor wrote:

We're getting started on Solaris 11 and using zones and I'm not familiar with installing Oracle inside a zone.  
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>Is a zone basically a standard solaris installation running "virtualized"?  In other words, for each zone, do we setup the necessary limits and parameters using the Solaris installation guide - pre-installation tasks? Or is that handled at the main server layer and replicated down to the zones?
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>My initial reading suggests that each zone is a standalone operating system in a "virtualized" environment but I'm not sure.  (Also, is "virtualized" the right term for a zone in this context?)
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>Thanks,
>Chris
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>

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