Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Hard Partitioning:
Hard partitioning—a form of server virtualization—provides the ability to group
multiple subsets of resources in the server in such a way that each group is not only
software fault isolated, but also fully hardware and electrically fault isolated. It is
important to understand how the hardware works and how physical resources are
assigned to domains, as both of these factors have a direct impact on the applications
running in the domain or in an Oracle Solaris Container.
The implementation of hard partitions differs in important ways from other
virtualization technologies. Technologies based on hypervisors and operating sys-
tem virtualization depend on services running in a special domain to configure the
guest virtual environments. The use of virtualized interfaces (e.g., network, disks,
CPUs, consoles) means that these interfaces must be routed through the hypervisor,
which in turn affects performance. Where there is a requirement for bare-metal
performance, high I/O throughput, and large memory footprint, yet flexible config-
urability is needed, then hard domaining (hard partitions) should be considered.
This chapter covers the fundamental concepts behind Dynamic Domains, in-
cluding how they are designed, configured, and managed.
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