Learning how to utilize the SolarisTM 10 Operating System's (Solaris OS) built-in utility tools to instrument and manage SolarisTM Zones in SolarisTM Containers is the topic of a September 2005 Sun PDF by Lei Liu. Benefits derived from these utilities when integrated with management entities allow for the monitoring and alarm setting of zone status for management applications on the Solaris OS with a minimal amount of coding.

Solaris Containers is designed and implemented as a system-level virtualization model to provide a means of virtualizing the operating system environment within a shared instance of the Solaris OS. Solaris Containers offers a complex execution environment for a set of software services and a separate Solaris environment within a single Solaris instance.

A component of Solaris Containers is the Solaris Zones partitioning technology, which has a new performance metric and resource management feature. The latter enables system administrators to control how applications use available system resources, while monitoring how computing resources are allocated to processes.

Utility tools within the Solaris OS offer system administrators the ability to discover zones and to instrument a zone-specific matrix. The utility can be easily integrated with a management entity on the managed node for system and performance management solution providers.

Liu walks readers through the flow of zone management to illustrate the usage of the utilities. He describes the use of zone service delivery and zone instance discovery. Additionally, he notes, by leveraging the rlogin and ssh functionality, the management host can remotely instrument the managed hosts.

Zone-specific performance monitoring is detailed with Liu's description of how to obtain user count statistics and a zone statistics report. He instructs readers with example inputs along with descriptions of each in an easy-to-read table format, following with a sample output.

Using this basic format throughout his 29-page document, Liu demonstrates how to activate and use the general system activity reporter, zone CPU monitoring, zone process monitoring, virtual memory statistics, swap statistics, I/O statistics, iostat(1M) to generate partition and device statistics, disk usage, inode usage on the file system, network interface, network statistics, ipc status, system contract, resource management, project process monitoring, resource utilization with cap enforcement, dynamic resource pools (DRP) resource management, multiple reports at specific intervals, resource set statistics and extended accounting facility.

"All these utilities in the Solaris OS give administrators, system monitoring solution providers, and data center operators flexible instrumentation at system run time to identify performance bottleneck and service-level issues," Liu concludes. "The integration of these utilities with traditional system management solutions can provide realtime reports on data center operations." [...read more...]

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