[rescue] Solaris 10 and "grid containers" and "zones"

[Patrick Giagnocavo +1.717.201.3366]

On Fri, May 07, 2004 at 10:01:51PM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> On Fri, May 07, 2004 at 08:25:34PM -0400, Patrick Giagnocavo +1.717.201.3366 wrote:
> > You can take any system running Sol10 and give people virtual
> > machines.  They can even have their own "root" password that lets them
> > change be root, but only inside their VM.  You can control resource
> > usage so that, for example, a fork bomb inside a VM would not use 100%
> > of the CPU or RAM.
> 
> I need to read up on it more, as I would hate to have to do a separate
> /usr/local/<stuff> install for each VM.

It uses LOFS (loopback file system?) to mount different directories
inside the VM.  So you can tell it to just put /usr inside the VM, and
it will do so.

Sun has a link to this newsgroup posting from one of the architects:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=c1j796%2424c%241%40news1nwk.SFbay.Sun.COM&oe=utf-8&output=gplain

Which shows a typical "what you need to type" transcript of setting up
a VM.  I am sure that a little bit of Perl, m4, or just shell
programming would easily let you set up templates and automate the
whole thing.

>From reading the forums it seems like it runs well already but needs
some polishing before it is ready to ship.

This is the kind of technology that Sun needs to have in order to 

a) sell their big iron vs. IBM 

b) have useful features that are better than what Linux gives (UML has
a performance hit, and the 2.6 kernel's context-based stuff is not yet
polished).

> > ObRescue: will Sol10 run on an E4000 with 250Mhz/1MB cache CPUs?
> 
> It should run on any UltraSPARC-II or above machine.

<crosses fingers that he gets the machine>

--Patrick