Using Logical Domains and CoolThreads Technology: Improving Scalability and System Utilization 
by Ning Sun and Lee Anne Simmons
April, 2008
This blueprint describes a Sun project that explored the use of Sun's CMT platform and the Logical Domains (LDoms) virtualization technology as a means to increase application software scalability and improve system utilization. Using LDoms software, multiple logical systems — each with its own operating system and each running an independent instance of the application software — are created on a single server.
This project evaluated the use of a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 server running the OpenSolaris operating system and the Logical Domains Manager 1.0.1 software as the virtualization platform. Popular open source software products, including the MySQL database server, the Tomcat application server, and a demo application that simulates an online pet store, were used to build the Web application. Grinder, open source software from SourceForge, was used for load generation and testing. The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 server was configured with multiple logical domains, and the Web application performance was measured. The goal was to push the system to fully utilize system resources and achieve maximum transactions per second (TPS). Configurations with 6 logical domains and with 12 domains were compared, to determine any differences in CPU and network utilization. Deploying the application in a virtualized environment resulted in better utilization of system resources and as much as ten-times improvement in performance, when compared to a single application instance running on the system.
Contents:
- Scalability Issues of Web Applications
- Sun's Virtualization Solution
- Configuration Considerations
- Physical Test Environment
- Test Workload
- Test Procedures
- Server and Network Configuration
- Results and Analysis
- Summary
- About the Authors
- Acknowledgements
- References
- Related Resources
- Ordering Sun Documents
- Accessing Sun Documentation Online
- Appendix: Software Installation
A member of the Global Systems Engineering group, Lee Anne Simmons is an Engagement Architect, focused on providing Sun's customers technical solutions to solve their business requirements. She has extensive background in Information Technology with a focus on enterprise applications.
A member of Sun's Performance Application Engineering (PAE) group, Ning Sun is currently at work on several Web and application server performance projects. Her technical focus centers on the performance of networks, Java Technology, servlet and EJB containers. Ning has extensive background in the development of industry-standard benchmarks including SPECWeb, SPECjAppServer and TPC-W.
The authors would like to recognize Pallab Bhattacharya for his contributions to this article.
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