On 10/20/08 21:29, Challa, Narsimha Reddy (STSD-HYD) wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> I am new to Solaris containers. Can somebody please clarify the below 
> questions:
>  
>  
> 
>    1. What are the supported versions of Solaris that support Containers
>       concept? As per my search on this from “Solaris 10 Update 4 or
>       Update 5” onwards containers are supported.  Am I right?

Solaris Containers were delivered in the original 3/05 release of 
Solaris 10. Technically, Solaris Zone were delivered then, unless you 
count the Solaris Express previews of S10 before that. And since 
Containers is a marketing term to combine zones and resource management, 
the later updates of Solaris 9 had RM Containers. And RM goes back to at 
least 2.4 with processor sets (pset), 2.6 with the fair share scheduler 
(FSS or Solaris Resource Manager (SRM)), Solaris 9 with resource pools 
(an abstraction of pset), and then S10 with dynamic resource pools.


> 2.      Can raw disks be exported to Solaris containers from global 
> zone? Using “zonecfg” command we tried exporting devices (disk 
> partitions/SVM volumes) to containers. Once they have been exported we 
> are unable to see those in the “/dev/dsk” directory of the non global zone.

The zones FAQ at http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zones/faq/ 
discusses this. Did you reboot the zone?

The question I would ask is 'why do you nned to do this?' Zones is a 
security perimeter around a set of processes and additional services to 
make it look like its own system, without all the other stuff to make it 
a 'complete' system (those things are kept to the kernel and global zone.

One of the benefits is needing to manage devices only in the global 
zone. So when you have ten zones running, there is one device 
administration point, instead of eleven.

> Is there a known issue regarding this?
>  
> 3.      Is there any concept of virtual HBA in Solaris Containers? Are 
> external disks from the storage arrays presented directly to the Solaris 
> container? Can multipathing software be configured on the Solaris container?

No. Per above you can extend LUNs. Multipathing is a kernel/driver 
function for disk. IPMP (multipathing for IP) can be done in zone if it 
is of ip-type=exclusive, which is not the default. This puts more 
admin1stration into the non-global zone.

>  
> 4.      Is Volume management (SVM and VxVM) supported inside Solaris 
> containers today? Some of the old documents show that the volume 
> management commands are accessible but are modified to display the below 
> message. Is this still valid today?

SVM is. See the FAQ. You will need to ask Veritas about VxVM.

> /VxVM command_xxx ERROR msg_id: Please execute this operation in global 
> zone./
>  
> 5.      Can somebody clarify me whether ZFS is supported for containers? 
> Since ZFS has the concept of creating pool of devices first and on top 
> of that file systems can be created. I would like to know what kind of 
> support is there today for ZFS for Solaris containers?

This is evolving. You can delegate a ZFS file system into a zone. With 
the upcoming S10 10/08, the zone path is fully supported on ZFS. A 
future is to have a zone clone automatically do a ZFS clone--this is 
already in Solaris Nevada/SXCE.

>  
> 6.      What cluster softwares (Ex: VCS, Solaris) are supported with 
> Solaris Containers today?

Solaris Cluster supports zones. I don't know if RM is managed within the 
cluster framework, or outside of it. VCS supports zones.

> 7.      Can we get CPU and Memory utilization statistics used by a 
> specific container (either from with in the container or from global zone)?

Always from the global zone. What you can get within a non-global zone 
depends on resource management applied to the zone, especially for CPUs.

> 8.      What databases are supported today for Solaris containers? As 
> per the bigadmin document “db_in_containers”, only non-RAC Oracle is 
> supported by containers. Is this still valid today or is there support 
> provided for Oracle RAC?

Oracle is supported. I understand that RAC support may be coming.

>         Is DB2 supported inside containers?

I don't know.

Steffen

> Thanks in advance.
>  
> Regards,
> -Narsimha
>  
> 
> 
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