Summary: LDOM Questions

Thanks to D. Magda & D. Ross-Smith:

Questions:

Is it possible to fail-over LDOM between chassis?  I know this can be
accomplished with containers.

http://blogs.sun.com/jb/entry/flying_ldoms

Sun Cluster 3.2 2/08 added support for LDoms as well:

http://tinyurl.com/ycx26bc
http://wikis.sun.com/display/SunCluster/%28English%29+Sun+Cluster+3.2+2-
08+Release+Notes

--
You can do this in the latest versions.  What we've been hesitant to do
is implement it because of the perceived complexity compared to
containers.
--

> How does Windows fit into this: say we have a Blade container with a
> mix of AMD and SPARC systems.

You'll need to find a clustering solution for Windows, or have Windows
running as a VMware guest and use something like VMotion.

> Under what circumstances would one run Containers inside of a LDOM?

Each LDom on a physical host can run a different version of the Solaris
10 kernel (e.g., Update 6, Update 7, and Update 8). Within each OS
instance you can multiple zones, but each of those zones has to be at
the same kernel level, and generally the entire OS is at the same patch
level (i.e., all zones have the same patches).

So, if you have a bunch of software that needs version X of Solaris
patches, and a bunch that needs a different version of patching ("Y"),
you can theoretically do the following: set up one LDom at version X,
and create a zone for each application (to take advantage of resource
and security isolation). Then, set up an LDom with version Y and create
zones for those applications.

In this way you can have one physical machine that has multiple releases
of Solaris, and in each of those have multiple zones.

In reality though I think this would be fairly convoluted and hard to
keep track of. It would probably be logistically simpler if you some
machines / blades dedicated to only zones, and others only running
LDoms. You use more resources, but you can keep track where you know
some particular systems are for zones and others are for LDoms.
_______________________________________________
sunmanagers mailing list
sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers