Managing Solaris Containers with xVM Ops Center

Solaris Containers (sometimes also called Zones) are today the most popular way to virtualize Solaris.  I've talked to customers everywhere that use them.  In the current version of Ops Center we have a number of ways to make your life easier when administering Containers.  In fact, BigAdmin has a great article that covers this in-depth.  It's surely worth a read.

Below is a screenshot I took today on my Ops Center 2.1 test rig that includes a pair of Solaris Containers (you can see them as children in the main "gear" tree below the main OS instanced (aka the Global Zone).

When you select one of the Containers you can see an inspector like the one below (this is just a sub-set of the info we can display).

However, there's been a key limitation in our Container management story to date with Ops Center.  The creation of a new container hasn't been tightly managed.  We've been able to provision multiple containers with a bare-metal OS, but the dyanamic lifecycle management of Containers hasn't been available.  That's all changing in the upcoming version 2.5 release.  Below is a snapshot of the wizard that you use to create a new Container.  It's looks very similar (by design!) to the wizard you use to create a new x86 VM inside xVM Server or a new SPARC VM inside the Logical Domains hypervisor (more on that next week).

With this capability, we will have full lifecycle management for Solaris containers inside Ops Center.  And, this includes management of the virtual networks and storage for the Containers (a complicated bit of administration to be sure!).  Best of all, it's integrated with Ops Center's existing capabilities like patching and hardware management. 

Posted at 01:09PM May 28, 2009 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter  |  Comments[3]