Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Solaris Containers were introduced with Solaris 10, and have been continually
enhanced and widely adopted since then. They permit robust, scalable, and highly
flexible virtualization without committing to a particular chip architecture.
An additional strength is that Containers can be used in conjunction with any
of the other technologies to create highly flexible virtualization architectures.
When an Oracle Solaris system is hosted in a Dynamic Domain, Logical Domain,
or virtual machine, deploying application environments inside Containers nested
within those virtual environments provides additional benefits. Security is en-
hanced by Containers' ability to provide a locked-down environment. Containers
can be quickly and easily cloned, which simplifies the provisioning of additional
virtual environments. Perhaps most important, the low resource requirements
and scalability make it possible to locate many isolated virtual environments
within the same domain or virtual machine, providing better scalability than
would be possible with domains or hypervisor technology alone.
One way to realize the most benefits from this combination is to deploy a new
domain or virtual machine when a virtual environment needs a dedicated operat-
ing system instance, and to deploy Containers within the virtual environment for
Solaris virtual environments with compatible OS software levels. That combina-
tion exploits the advantages of both forms of virtualization.
Application and organizational requirements drive virtualization technology se-
lection, just as with any architectural decision. The process of choosing any tech-
nology should start by assessing the required systemic properties. Each of these
requirements can suggest or preclude one or more virtualization technologies:
Does the solution require a large number of virtualized environments
with highly granular resource assignment, or are only a few environments
required?
■
Are workloads dynamic in nature, requiring the ability to easily change re-
source assignments?
■
Are full fault and service isolation needed with no single points of failure?
■
Is maximum performance needed? This consideration is important for work-
loads that are I/O intensive or make many system calls, because some virtu-
alization technologies introduce performance penalties for those aspects of
system behavior.
■
What are the availability requirements of the workloads being virtualized?
■
Search WWH ::
Custom Search