Sun Microsystems T5120, T5220 Fault Management and Predictive Self Healing, Solaris Containers

32 Enterprise-Class Software Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Solaris™ Containers

Providing virtualization at the OS level, Solaris Containers consist of a group of technologies that work together to efficiently manage system resources, virtualize the environment, and provide a complete, isolated, and secure runtime environment for applications. Solaris containers include important technologies that work together with the fair-share scheduler:

•Solaris Zones

The Solaris 10 OS provides a unique partitioning technology called Solaris Zones that can be used to create an isolated and secure environment for running applications. A zone is a virtualized operating system environment created within a single instance of the Solaris OS. Zones can be used to isolate applications and processes from the rest of the system. This isolation helps enhance security and reliability since processes in one zone are prevented from interfering with processes running in another zone.

•Resource Management

Resource management tools provided with the Solaris OS help allocate resources such as CPUs to specific applications. CPUs in a multiprocessor system (or threads in the UltraSPARC T2 processor) can be logically partitioned into processor sets and bound to a resource pool, which in turn can be assigned to a Solaris zone. Resource pools provide the capability to separate workloads so that consumption of CPU resources do not overlap, and also provide a persistent configuration mechanism for processor sets and scheduling class assignment. In addition, the dynamic features of resource pools enable administrators to adjust system resources in response to changing workload demands.

Fault Management and Predictive Self Healing

The Solaris 10 OS introduced a new architecture for building and deploying systems and services capable of fault management and predictive self-healing. Predictive Self Healing is an innovative capability in the Solaris 10 OS that automatically diagnoses, isolates, and recovers from many hardware and application faults. As a result, business- critical applications and essential system services can continue uninterrupted in the event of software failures, major hardware component failures, and even software mis- configuration problems.

•Solaris Fault Manager

The Solaris Fault Manager facility collects data relating to hardware and software errors. This facility automatically and silently detects and diagnoses the underlying problem, with an extensible set of agents that automatically respond by taking the faulty component offline. Easy-to-understand diagnostic messages link to articles in Sun’s knowledge base to clearly guide administrators through corrective tasks that require human intervention. The open design of the Solaris Fault Manager facility also permits administrators and field personnel to observe