The new Beta release of OpenSolaris Network Virtualization and Resource Control, often referred to by its project name "Crossbow," has now shipped to a world wide group of Beta customers.

You can also get involved in the activities. First, visit the OpenSolaris Crossbow project site "What's New" page, which summarizes the release. Then, if interested, you can download code for both x86 and SPARC-based systems at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/crossbow/snapshots/.

Crossbow team members have blogged extensively about their activities on the project. You can find a good table of contents and links to these blogs at the team's blog site.

Wondering about how your system--and, by extension, your site--could use the network virtualization and resource control features provided by the Crossbow project? Then check out the use cases entry at Steffen Weiberle's blog, What the krowteN? .

Congratulations to the Crossbow team, who have worked long and hard on the release.

Steff's here, dropping by on Penny's site.

I've got great news for everyone who is interested in network virtualization and resource control for Solaris. The OpenSolaris Crossbow project team has just dropped a pre-beta snapshot of the Crossbow code at the project web site. The project "What's New" page is a good place to get started.

Want to use the new pre-Beta code? Then go to the OpenSolaris Crossbow site at: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/crossbow/snapshots/

For technical details on the newest Crossbow feature Etherstubs, check out Nicolas Droux's newest blog entry.

If you are unfamiliar with Crossbow and would like an overview, I humbly submit a link to my Wikipedia article OpenSolaris Network Virtualization and Resource Control. Congratulations to team lead Kais Belgaied and the members of Project Crossbow.

Recently, an incompatibility between the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant ("Project Etude", or S8MA) and recent versions of the Solaris 10 8/07 kernel patch was discovered. Currently, S8MA is only supported on a limited set of Solaris 10 kernel patches.

To use the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant, you must be running the Solaris 10 8/07 release with one of the following versions of the 127111 patch installed:

       127111-01 SunOS 5.10: kernel patch
       127111-02 SunOS 5.10: kernel patch
       127111-03 SunOS 5.10: kernel patch

There are later revisions of the 127111 KU patch available, but these versions are not supported with S8MA at this time. If you attempt to use KU patches newer than 127111-03 with S8MA, your system will not function reliably. This could result in a system panic when starting a solaris8 branded zone.

Please note that this problem does not pose any risk to non-S8MA systems. It did not arise from a defect in the 127111-* patch series. 127111-* patches should be applied to non-S8MA systems as usual.

A new Solaris 8 Migration Assistant patch, 128548-02, will be released soon. This will be available from SunSolve. This patch will allow S8MA to be run on Solaris 10 8/07 with 127111-01 and all subsequent KU patches. When this new patch is released, all S8MA users will be required to install it to have a supportable configuration.

Please be prepared to install this new Solaris 8 Migration Assistant patch when it is available.

The S8MA enables you to migrate a Solaris 8 host to a solaris8 branded zone (also known as a Solaris 8 container) on a Solaris 10 host. The solaris8 zone is an environment for Solaris 8 applications on SPARC machines running the Solaris 10 8/07 Operating System or later. The brand supports the execution of 32-bit and 64-bit Solaris 8 applications.

For more information, see Dan's blog and the System Administration Guide: Solaris 8 Branded Zones in the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant 1.0 Collection. The Solaris 8 Migration Assistant product is available for download at the product download site. You can obtain an 90-day evaluation copy if desired.

I'm peaking in at Penny's invitation to tell you a little about Project Crossbow, an umbrella term for the features in the Solaris OS that implement network virtualization and resource control. Crossbow development is under way at the OpenSolaris Crossbow: Network Virtualization and Resource Control site. Using the Crossbow features, you can set up a "network-in-the-box" for a single system equipped with the latest GLDv3 interfaces, such as bge and xge. That single system could be as complex as a data center server equipped with multiple CPUs or as simple as your laptop.

So, what's in the network-in-the box?

The chief feature is the virtual NIC, or VNIC, a pseudo-interface configured on the system's physical interface. You can set up bandwidth management and flow control on each VNIC to greatly improve each physical interface's performance.

To isolate applications and further improve performance, you can create a "virtual network" for the system by configuring a container, such as IP Instances, zones, or xVM, on top of each VNIC. Standard tools such as ping and snoop can observe the doings on the individual containers. Finally, these containers can then exchange data without having to send their packet traffic over the external network. Instead, internal traffic is forwarded by Crossbow's virtual switch feature.

For more details, see Steffen Wieberle's Crossbow FAQ, which covers the basics about IP Instances, VNICs, and flow control Crossbow style. If you want the full technical scoop, the Crossbow Documentation page hosts the latest design docs, such as "Crossbow Hardware Resources Management and Virtualization" by Kais Belgaied and Roamer Lu, and "Crossbow Virtualization Architecture" by Nicolas Droux.

If you are new to the concept of network virtualization and want to learn more, I humbly present my Wikipedia article, Network Virtualization, a survey overview of the topic.

The work was done by Evan Hoke from CMU. Starting with OpenSolaris build 72 and later, experimental Linux 2.6 kernel emulation support has been added to the lx brand. With his changes, you can now install and run Centos 4.x and 5.x in lx branded zones. For more information, see Ed's forum posting and the documentation.

Marc Hamilton, Dan Price, and Bob Wientzen have been blogging about project Etude and the new solaris8 branded zone that will be available as the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant.

A solaris8 non-global zone is a complete runtime environment for Solaris 8 applications on SPARC machines running Solaris 10. An existing Solaris 8 system can be directly migrated into a solaris8 container, or you can use the provided Solaris 8 based image. The brand supports the execution of 32-bit and 64-bit Solaris 8 applications. Many Solaris 10 capabilities are available to the solaris8 zones, including the ability to run on newer hardware that Solaris 8 does not support, and Solaris 10 performance improvements.

The standard zonecfg, zoneadm, and zlogin commands are used to create, install, log into, and administer the zone.

We're #2! And it's a great start!

The news is really amazing. In response to last month's ITSO Quick Poll question at TeamQuest:

Which virtualization platform are you currently using or planning to deploy?

Solaris 10 Zones was in second place, ahead of every product but VMware. For the details, see the August 2007 ITSO News.

The new community drop of Xen based on build 66 became available July 18th as Solaris Xen Update—OpenSolaris Drop (July 2007).

Some great blogs on the new release can be accessed from the OpenSolaris Xen site. This one from John Levon announced the release and provides an overview. Ryan Scott posted a blog on Changing a Domain's Memory Size Under Xen (ballooning). Several engineers offer tips on various aspects of using the new release in their blogs.

We also have docs and man pages available. See Download, Installation, and Configuration Information to get started. A few format and last-minute content issues kept me from posting this blog; I wanted to correct the materials before I mentioned them here. We will have a mechanism for users to post comments about the docs on the site soon.

Get ready for a new community drop of Xen based on build 66 and available on OpenSolaris as Solaris Xen Update—OpenSolaris Drop (July 2007). The announcement could come at any time, and we'll cover it here!

On another topic, the changes recently implemented in the docs.sun.com site have vastly improved performance. I think you'll be very pleased when you use the documents now.

You can run Linux applications on the Solaris OS using BrandZ technology in the next Solaris 10 update. Linux applications run unmodified in the secure environment provided by the non-global zone feature. You can use the Solaris system to develop, test, and deploy Linux applications. The lx brand includes the tools necessary to install a CentOS 3.x or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.x distribution inside a non-global zone. Versions 3.5 to 3.8 of each distribution are supported. The brand supports the execution of 32-bit Linux applications on x86 and x64 machines.

The OpenSolaris Community: BrandZ is a best place to find out about BrandZ, the lx brand, and associated community projects.

Information on configuring, installing, and installing applications in an lx branded zone on Solaris will be available in System Administration Guide: Solaris Containers--Resource Management and Solaris Zones on docs.sun.com soon. In the meantime, see Part III Branded Zones in the SXDE version of the guide. This technology is currently available in SX DE and community releases.

Container Manager enables you to create and manage containers, projects, resource pools, and zones. Container Manager is an add-on software product to the Sun Management Center. The current release is the 3.6.1 version. The Sun Management Center 3.6.1 Document Collection is available at docs.sun.com.

For highlights of the new features, see The BigAdmin System Administration Portal:

• Feature Article Enhancements in Solaris Container Manager 3.6.1 .

• The Resource Description Page, which links to Amol Chiplunkar's blog. The blog offers a small demo as well.

To learn about container migration, see Steve Wilson's blog Solaris Container Migration Made Easy, which includes the following example screen shot of the tool:

The Logical Domains (LDoms) software is Sun's new server virtualization and partitioning technology. The LDoms 1.0 software can be downloaded from www.sun.com/download.

The Beginners Guide to LDoms: Understanding and Deploying Logical Domains (PN 820-0832) can be downloaded from the Sun BluePrints site.

The following product documentation is available at www.sun.com/documentation:

• Logical Domains (LDoms) 1.0 Administration Guide (PN 819-6428)
• Logical Domains (LDoms) 1.0 Release Notes (PN 819-6429)

You can use zonecfg to dynamically create a pool for your zone when it is running.
zonecfg:new-zone> add dedicated-cpu
zonecfg:new-zone:dedicated-cpu> set ncpus=1-3
zonecfg:new-zone:dedicated-cpu> set importance=2
zonecfg:new-zone:dedicated-cpu> end

The capped-memory resource sets limits for physical, swap, and locked memory.
zonecfg:new-zone> add capped-memory
zonecfg:new-zone:capped-memory> set physical=50m
zonecfg:new-zone:capped-memory> set swap=100m
zonecfg:new-zone:capped-memory> set locked=30m
zonecfg:new-zone:capped-memory> end

You can specify zone-wide resource controls as global property names:
zonecfg:new-zone> set cpu-shares=5

There are two new ways to set the scheduling class:

• You can use the new scheduling-class property in zonecfg to set the scheduling class for the zone.
• If the new cpu-shares rctl is set and FSS has not been set as the scheduling class for the zone through another action, zoneadmd sets the scheduling class to FSS when the zone boots.

The other new features in Solaris 10 7/07 and Solaris Express Developer Edition 5/07 include: Enhancements to rcapd and prstat and the ability to use the zonecfg command to configure the resource management settings for the global zone, and a new IP type in addition to shared-IP for non-global zones, exclusive-IP (dedicated network interface), specified in zonecfg:
zonecfg:new-zone> set ip-type=exclusive
zonecfg:new-zone> add net
zonecfg:new-zone:net> set physical=bge32001
zonecfg:new-zone> end

Some references for more information include: an advance copy of the System Administration Guide: Solaris Containers--Resource Management and Solaris Zones posted on the Zones community site, Jerry's blog on containers, and Donghai Han's Weblog on new IP functionality.

LDoms is Sun's system partitioning technology for CoolThreads based servers (like the T1000 and T2000). Honglin writes that Ldoms 1.0 has been released! Check out Honglin's Blog for some background information, including a really cool flash demo. We'll be bringing you more information about LDOMs in the coming months.

PS
Our promised blog on using the new Containers features in the upcoming Solaris Express Developer Edition 5/07 and Solaris 10 7/07 releases will be posted soon.