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Storage: ZFS Virtualization
Hypervisor:
Chip Multithreading:
Figure 12. Sun provides parallelization and virtualization at every level of the technology stack
Corresponding layers of virtualization technology are built on top of the hypervisor as shown in Figure 12. The strength of Sun’s approach is that all of the layers of the architecture are fully multithreaded, from the processor up through applications that use the fully threaded Java application model. Far from new technology, the Solaris OS has provided multithreading support since 1992. This experience has helped to inform technology decisions at other levels, ultimately resulting in a system that parallelizes and virtualizes at every level. In addition to the processor and hypervisor, Sun provides fully multithreaded networking and the fully multithreaded ZFS file system. Sun Logical Domains (LDOMs), Solaris Containers, and multithreaded applications are able to receive exactly the resources they need.
Sun Logical Domains
Supported in all Sun servers utilizing CMT technology, Sun Logical Domains provide full virtual machines that run an independent operating system instance, and contain virtualized CPU, memory, storage, console, and cryptographic devices. Within the Sun Logical Domains architecture, operating systems such as the Solaris 10 OS are written to the hypervisor, which provides a stable, idealized, and virtualizable representation of the underlying server hardware to the operating system in each Logical Domain. Each Logical Domain is completely isolated, and the maximum number of virtual machines created on a single platform relies upon the capabilities of the hypervisor, rather than the number of physical hardware devices installed in the system. For example, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 server with a single UltraSPARC T2 processor supports up to 64 logical domains1, and each individual logical domain can run a unique OS instance.
1.Though possible, this practice is not a generally recommended.