Saturday December 15, 2007
Saturday December 15, 2007 Solaris Containers came to the rescue
One of my friends leading a quality team responsible for performance/stress testing of a network intensive application, had something interesting to discuss with me few months back.
The application has multiple instances of a component communicating to a central server over the network. In a customer environment, this piece of the software has one instance on one OS instance. This one does a lot of snmp talk back n forth with the server. The test case was to have ~1500 instances talking to a single server at a time. His team has a simulation script that runs 50 to 100 instances on one box. He had used 15 to 30 Solaris 8 and 9 hosts some 4 yrs back to successfully test it. Amazing effort ! Because those many instances are good enough to drive the system crazy. And managing 15 to 30 such system must have been SOMEthing!
The current situation was that he had a lab with reduced resources, a smaller team and very few days to repeat it with the latest version of the same s/w. So I gave him the obvious suggestion ! Virtualize the host(s) to get the magic set of 15 to 30 os instances. And more obvious choice of virtualization technology in this case, Solaris Containers. All the team needed was multiple OS instances of the same OS flair. Within this constraint, containers are extremely lightweight. The team had a 24 vCPU 48 G RAM box that was selected to host them.
So it all looked great on the paper. One of his team members configured some 8 zones to start with and started instantiating 100 per zone. The moment the instances in just 2 of them started talking over the network, the system refused to respond to any of the terminals connected. Although there were s/w partitions in the form of zones, all were sharing a NIC.
A team meeting with a few glum faces and few 'I knew it' remarks... And here is when the exclusive IP stack support added to containers came to the rescue !!! With additional NICs on board, and an upgrade to Solaris 10 Update 4, the zones were reconfigured to have exclusive ip type. And it worked !! 30 boxes down to a single box. So easy to manage, fast boot and shutdown, nearly instantaneous replication with cloning to get 16 Containers running 100 instances each. Cool Stuff !!!
Wednesday November 14, 2007 Sun Management Center 4.0 is out
Now that Sun Management Center 4.0 has been released, I guess I can come back to blogging a bit.
 | A lot of resources are available in the form of blogs, documents, forums, web casts. Some of them are: |
Let me try posting some feature specific information in my next posts. Posted by chiplunkar ( Nov 14 2007, 08:32:04 PM IST ) Permalink Comments [2]
Thursday May 10, 2007 Let me use this entry to list my bigadmin articles, else I myself may lose track 
- Enhancements in Solaris Container Manager 3.6.1 (via patches)
- What's new in container manager
- What's new in Sun MC 3.6.1
- Extending Sun Management Center Agent Update
- Articles listed on sysmgt hub
- Consolidating Servers and Applications using Solaris Container Manager
- Zone Enhancements in Solaris Container Manager 4.0
- Upgrading Sun Management Center to 4.0
- What's new in Sun Management Center 4.0
Sunday April 22, 2007 What's new in container manager
We added a lot of cool features to Container Manager recently by means of 125830-03, 125831-03, 125832-03, 125833-03, 125834-03.
[Read More] Posted by chiplunkar ( Apr 22 2007, 04:20:00 AM IST ) Permalink Comments [11]
Sunday December 10, 2006
Virtualization I was in mumbai yesterday and day before, talking about the most loved and hated term these days, 'virtualization' ...
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Posted by chiplunkar
( Dec 10 2006, 01:20:51 AM IST )
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Thursday September 07, 2006
Sun Fire T1000 Physical View The lean and thin system looks like a helpless, small, dull box... What's that ! 24 Processors ??? !!! I can see only one, where are the remaining 23 of them !!!
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Posted by chiplunkar
( Sep 07 2006, 05:38:11 PM IST )
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Tuesday June 27, 2006 Extending Sun Management Center Agent Update Agent Update can be exploited to deploy things like your own sunmc module, a bunch of files or a small application remotely on solaris sparc/i386, Linux, provided they are running sunmc 3.6 agents. [Read More] Posted by chiplunkar ( Jun 27 2006, 03:00:00 PM IST ) Permalink Comments [0]
Monday June 19, 2006 Hands free sun management center server installation An installation configuration file for a hands free sunmc server installation. [Read More] Posted by chiplunkar ( Jun 19 2006, 05:00:00 PM IST ) Permalink Comments [3]
Saturday April 15, 2006 They say container manager is ... Had a conference call with folks outside sun who were not so impressed with what they saw of Solaris Container Manager. [Read More] Posted by chiplunkar ( Apr 15 2006, 12:15:40 AM IST ) Permalink Comments [0]
