Roman Ivanov: All you need is /bin/sh

When someone is talking about cluster (in it's common meaning) we see the picture of big machines with a lots of cables and storage attached. But can you imagine a cluster on a chip? No cables. Cluster Interconnect is on the chip. Moreother, it can be 1U server which you can put on the back seat of your car and take it to your customer for demo. So it will be “mobile 1U cluster on a chip”.

Here is an exercise for you to build mobile 1U cluster on a chip.

Input:

• Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 Server

• Solaris 10 10/08 aka U6

• Logical Domains 1.1 (Ldoms)

• Sun Cluster as it now supports guest Logical Domains.

With the latest release of Ldoms 1.1 you can get extra HA features, just to name a few closely related to this exercise:

• Virtual Switch Support for Link Aggregated Interface

• Virtual Disk Multipathing and Failover

• Network Virtual I/O Performance Enhancement

Tip: Since you will be limited by storage then put ZFS on single drive and use it as a back end for each node system disk, also use clone feature to setup multiple nodes.

Question: I want to install more than one guest domain. Is there any way to speedup process.

Answer: Yes, sure.

This instruction can be used as supplimental to «Run your first Logical Domain in 10 minutes» as well as a separate guide.

1. First setup the Control Domain and install the First Guest Domain ldg1. Use ZFS volume (In example, data/demo/ldg1) as back end drive for the system drive of guest domain. You can install Solaris either through a Network Install or by mounting a DVD or ISO file.

2. Log in to the First guest domain Console and do 'sys-unconfig' in the domain.

# sys-unconfig
                        
WARNING

This program will unconfigure your system.  It will cause it
to revert to a "blank" system - it will not have a name or know
about other systems or networks.

This program will also halt the system.

Do you want to continue (y/n) ? y

3. Wait for the system to come down and answer h — halt.

 svc.startd: The system is down. 

 syncing file systems... done 

 Program terminated 

  r)eboot, o)k prompt, h)alt?  h

4. From Control domain verify that guest domain ldg1 is stopped.

 # ldm ls 

 NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME 

 primary active -n-cv SP 4 4G 0.5% 1h 30m 

 ldg1 bound ----- 5000 14 1984M 

5. Unbind domain

 # ldm unbind ldg1 

6. Create a ZFS snapshot of the First Guest Domain's disk image:

# zfs snapshot data/demo/ldg1@install

7. Bind and Start domain back

# ldm bind ldg1 
# ldm start ldg1

8. Clone the snapshot using the name ldg2 as the target volume

# zfs clone data/demo/ldg1@install data/demo/ldg2

9. Setup 2 ^nd Guest domain by using newly created ZFS clone data/demo/ldg2 as back-end to system disk.

10. Repeat steps 8 and 9 for each next domain.