Sun Microsystems T5220, T5120 manual End-to-End Virtualization Technology, Solaris ZFS File System

29 Enterprise-Class Software Sun Microsystems, Inc.

•Support for Virtualized Networking and I/O, and Accelerated Cryptography

The Solaris OS contains technology to support and virtualize components and subsystems on the UltraSPARC T2 processor, including support for the on-chip

10 Gb Ethernet ports and PCI Express interface. As a part of a high-performance network architecture, CMT-aware device drivers are provided so that applications running within virtualization frameworks can effectively share I/O and network devices. Accelerated cryptography is supported through the Solaris Cryptographic framework.

•Solaris ZFS File System

Solaris ZFS offers a dramatic advance in data management, automating and consolidating complicated storage administration concepts and providing unlimited scalability with the world’s first 128-bit file system. ZFS is based on a transactional object model that removes most of the traditional constraints on I/O issue order, resulting in dramatic performance gains. ZFS also provides data integrity, protecting all data with 64-bit checksums that detect and correct silent data corruption.

•A Secure and Robust Enterprise-Class Environment

Best of all, the Solaris OS doesn’t require arbitrary sacrifices. The Solaris Binary Compatibility Guarantee helps ensure that existing SPARC applications continue to run unchanged on UltraSPARC T2 platforms, protecting investments. Certified multi-level security protects Solaris environments from intrusion. Sun’s comprehensive Fault Management Architecture means that elements such as Solaris Predictive Self Healing can communicate directly with the hardware to help reduce both planned and unplanned downtime. Effective tools such as DTrace help organizations tune their applications to get the most of the system’s resources.

End-to-End Virtualization Technology

Virtualization technology is increasingly popular as organizations strive to consolidate disparate workloads onto fewer more powerful systems, while increasing utilization. Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers are specifically designed for virtualization, providing very fine-grained division of multiple resources — from processing to virtualized networking and I/O. Most importantly, Sun’s virtualization technology is provided as a part of the system, not an expensive add-on.

A Multithreaded Hypervisor

Like the UltraSPARC T1 processor, the UltraSPARC T2 processor offers a multithreaded hypervisor — a small firmware layer that provides a stable virtual machine architecture that is tightly integrated with the processor. Multithreading is crucial, since the hypervisor interacts directly with the underlying chip-multithreaded UltraSPARC T2 processor. This architecture is able to context switch between multiple threads in a