Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
An extremely high level of compatibility with native (non-virtual
machine) environments.
Depending on the specific hypervisor and x86
processor in use, there may be incompatibilities compared to native execu-
tion regarding timer skew and accuracy, number of guest CPUs, or the ability
to emulate or pass through features for all I/O devices.
■
Large number of completely separate instances of Oracle Solaris
and other operating systems.
Each instance potentially can maintain its
own patch levels and maintenance windows without conflict or interference.
■
High resource granularity compared to hardware partitions, per-
mitting fine-grained assignment.
Hypervisors often permit oversub-
scription of CPU threads and RAM for enhanced consolidation ratios.
■
Coexistence of multiple operating environments that run on the
x86 platform.
This provides an opportunity to leverage infrastructure
investments for more heterogeneous OS mixtures. In contrast, most OS
virtualization implementations support only guests of the same OS type,
version, and patch level. Solaris 10 is an exception: It supports Solaris 8
Containers and Solaris 9 Containers—virtual environments that mimic dif-
ferent versions of Solaris.
■
Excellent support for business agility and operational efficiency.
Advanced features include VE cloning, mobility, and dynamic resource
management.
■
This category of virtualization has drawn the largest amount of popular atten-
tion owing to the vast size of the x86 market. The large number of non-virtualized,
low-utilization x86 systems, mostly running a single application under Windows,
provide many candidates for consolidation and make this style of virtualization ec-
onomically important. The ability to concurrently run different x86 operating sys-
tems on the same physical server also offers cost savings and operational flexibility.
The technologies discussed previously provide SPARC or x86 virtual machine or
domain environments that can run independent Solaris instances. As described in
Chapter 6, “Oracle Solaris Containers,” Oracle Solaris provides OS virtualization
(OSV) in the form of Solaris Containers, also called zones. Containers provide
multiple virtual Solaris environments within a single Solaris instance. This tech-
nology offers the following advantages:
Fault isolation.
Service and application failures in one container have no
effect on other Containers.
■
Search WWH ::
Custom Search