Using LDOM’s to Create Virtual Machines

My interest in virtualization started many years ago, and I have played with Xen, Zones, VmWare, etc.  VmWare is without question the 800 LB gorilla in this space.  They have many, many great features that come at a price.  Sun XVM is a solution that is not quite as mature but comes at a cheaper price and Virtualbox is free and competes with VmWare Player. Sun now has a product line ready for cloud computing:
  • CMT Systems
  • Intel/AMD Systems
  • Blade Systems
  • Openstorage
  • Domains, XVM, Virtualbox, ZFS, Zones, and LDOMS’s
I started playing with LDOM’s a few years ago and thought, “This is a pretty cool!” I was concerned that we were relying on one CPU to maintain multiple OS’s but this wasn’t sold as a HW domain. So what I did was get the EIS docs and DVD for the T2000 and build it according to best practices. I ensured that everything was patched prior to creating my LDOM’s. I installed the LDOM’s packages and setup the control domain as follows:
  • 1 x mau unit (bound on a per-core basis, so we need to release these ?rst)
  • 4 x virtual CPUs (1 core on an Ultra SPARC T1 system)
  • 1024 Mbytes memory
  • Configuration default
After I created the control domain, I used two of the T2000’s four disks to create a mirrored zfs pool called ldomspool. I used this to create my bootdisks for the additional LDOM’s. At first I had a hard time connecting to the console of my secondary LDOM and then realized that I didn’t start vntsd, so: svcadm enable vntsd I then jumpstarted my first LDOM and then used the ZFS snapshot to create a clone for my third, fourth, LDOM. LDOM’s allow you to create virtual machines that take advantage of the massive thread scale offered by these platforms. You can create up to 256 virtual servers on one system! With LDoms 1.1, the ability to migrate a guest domain, i.e. suspend the running Solaris instance to memory, copy it to another physical CMT machine, and resume it there, was introduced. How are you using LDOM’s?