31 | Sun Microsystems, Inc. |
By taking advantage of Logical Domains, organizations gain the flexibility to deploy multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single platform. In addition, administrators can leverage virtual device capabilities to transport an entire software stack hosted on a Logical Domain from one physical machine to another. Logical Domains can also host Solaris Containers to capture the isolation, flexibility, and manageability features of both technologies. Deeply integrating Logical Domains with both the UltraSPARC T2 processor and the Solaris 10 OS increases flexibility, isolates workload processing, and improves the potential for maximum server utilization.
The Logical Domains architecture includes underlying server hardware, hypervisor firmware, virtualized devices, and guest, control, and service domains. The hypervisor firmware provides an interface between each hosted operating system and the server hardware. An operating system instance controlled and supported by the hypervisor is called a guest domain. Communication to the hypervisor, hardware platform, and other domains for creation and control of guest domains is handled by the control domain. Guest domains are granted virtual device access via a service domain which controls both the system and hypervisor, and also assigns I/O.
To support virtualized networking, Logical Domains implement a virtual Layer 2 switch, to which guest domains can be connected. East guest domain can be connected to multiple vswitches and multiple guest domains can also be connected to the same vswitch. Vswitches can either be associated with a real physical network port, or they may exist without an associated port, in which case the vswitch provides only communications between domains within the same server. This approach also gives guest domains a direct communication channel to the network (Figure 13). Each guest domain believes it owns the entire NIC and the bandwidth it provides, yet in practice only a portion of the total bandwidth is allotted to the domain. As a result, every NIC can be configured as demand dictates, with each domain receiving bandwidth on an as- needed basis.
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Figure 13. Data moves directly between a Logical Domain and a virtualized device
