Oracle Solaris Containers - Oracle Solaris 10 System Virtualization Essentials - page 199

Dedicated CPUs allow you to minimize software licensing costs for some soft-
ware. Instead of licensing the software for all 256 CPU cores in an M9000,
you may be able to assign a much smaller number (e.g., 16) to a Container
and pay for only a 16-core software license. When configured correctly, dedi-
cated CPUs also maximize performance of the associated Container because
its processes are more likely to return to the same CPU every time it gets
a time slice, thereby reducing the effects of cache eviction and maintaining
data in memory attached to that CPU.

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A CPU cap is useful to set user expectations among early users of a system.
Otherwise, users may become accustomed to the response time they observe
when they can use all of the CPUs in the system, only to be disappointed
later by the system's response time when they are sharing the CPUs. Service
providers also use CPU caps to ensure that their users can use only the com-
pute capacity they paid for.

■

CPU Usage Monitoring Tools Oracle Solaris 10 includes some CPU monitoring
tools that are available on most UNIX-like operating systems as well as some that
are unique to Solaris. These include ps , prstat , poolstat , and mpstat .
The ps command has two new options to help observe Containers:

■ -Z : Adds a new column of output labeled ZONE (the name of the Container in
which the process is running)
■ -z <name> : Limits the output to processes in the Container specified by
<name>

The following example shows ps output limited to one Container's processes.
Notice that zsched has a parent PID of 1, which is the global zone's init process.
Also, note that zsched is the parent of the Container's init process, and the
Container's svc.startd and svc.configd services have also been inherited by
the global zone's init process.

GZ# ps -fz myzone
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
root 1076 1 0 18:15:15 ? 0:00 zsched
root 1089 1076 0 18:15:16 ? 0:00 /sbin/init
root 1091 1 0 18:15:16 ? 0:06 /lib/svc/bin/svc.startd
root 1093 1 0 18:15:16 ? 0:08 /lib/svc/bin/svc.configd
...

Of course, users of the Container can use the ps command. As mentioned ear-
lier, the zlogin command can be issued from the global zone to run a program in
the Container—in this case, ps -ef .