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A Solaris Virtual Network Router

Sun’s Virtual Network Machines project http://opensolaris.org/os/project/vnm/ is investigating ways to process network traffic on general-purpose servers, using a general-purpose operating system. This week a LiveCD distribution of the core components needed to configure a software-based router device on OpenSolaris was made available at http://opensolaris.org/os/project/vnm/VirtualRouter/VNRP/

One can freely download these components and quickly configure and run a virtual router on any device that runs Solaris.

The virtual router runs on Project Indiana, the open source binary distribution of OpenSolaris. When the LiveCD distribution is booted on a system that supports the Solaris operating system it allows configuration of a software-based router.

This virtual router project comes with two pre-configured zones (in addition to the global zone). The zones are labeled as Internet and Intranet zones with the ability to add adapters and choose some of the routing protocols to be run in each zone (this is done through a Web interface and is seen when the Indiana based router boots up). This allows for network isolation between zones. One may also choose to deploy the router functionality without zones. The intent here is to jumpstart some thinking into alternative and creative ways to use some of the more unique Solaris functionality. If one is satisfied with the router configuration, and functionality provided by the liveCD the process to lay it out to disk can be started by a single click. A driver will also be available that developers can use to communicate either between zones or between xVM guest images. 

Support for Virtualization

A general-purpose OS could take advantage of advances in server virtualization technology. Most enterprise IT departments have already experienced the benefits of server virtualization, which pools the resources of multiple physical machines and allows them to be allocated dynamically as needed. Similarly, storage virtualization pools data storage capabilities so that storage can be managed on the fly. Why not virtualize network machines? Using a general-purpose OS, multiple network devices could reside cooperatively on the same physical hardware machine.

To that end, the virtual router project also provides scripts and procedures that will allow the same ISO image to be brought up as a DomU instance on a system running Solaris xVM.

Posted at 05:40AM Jan 18, 2008 by sohrab in Sun  |  Comments[3]