Using Solaris Cluster and Sun Cluster Geographic Edition with Virtualization Technologies 
by Tim Read
April, 2008
Virtualization technologies have become more prevalent over the past few years as enterprises have striven to drive up the utilization of datacenter assets in order to maximize the return on capital investments. These technologies also allow organizations to manage datacenter assets more efficiently and effectively. Consequently, virtualization now permeates all aspects of the enterprise IT environment — servers, storage, networking, and software. In many cases, the goal is to consolidate older business or mission-critical systems onto newer, virtualized environments. However, resulting deployments must achieve the same levels of availability and disaster protection as the previous incarnations.
Today, Sun offers several virtualization technologies to address the needs of organizations: Dynamic System Domains, Logical Domains, and Solaris Containers. Additionally, open source and third party products such as the Sun xVM hypervisor and VMware are available. Each of these technologies has its own set of benefits and restrictions when combined with the Solaris Cluster software or its Open High Availability Cluster open source equivalent.
As there are several other Sun Blueprints and white papers available that cover the aforementioned virtualization technologies, they are not explained in detail here. Instead, this document considers the merits of each virtualization technology, or conversely, the restrictions it might impose on potential solution stacks.
- Introduction
- To Implement or Not To Implement?
- How Solaris Cluster Benefits Both Virtualized and Non-Virtualized Environments
- Virtualization Compatibility
- Axis One — Instruction Architecture
- Axis Two — Operating System
- Axis Three — Solaris Cluster and Sun Cluster Geographic Edition release
- Special Cases
- Suitability of virtualization options for business or mission- critical Solaris Cluster implementations
- Virtualization Technologies
- Dynamic System Domains
- Logical Domains
- Solaris Containers
- Sun xVM hypervisor
- EMC VMware ESX 3.x
- Fault Detection, Isolation, and Containmen
- Service Life Cycle Management
- Example Consolidations
- Multiple Oracle 9i, 10g, and 11g RAC databases
- Multitiered services
- Summary
Tim Read has worked in the UK computer industry since 1985. He joined Sun in 1990, in a pre-sales role, as a Systems Engineer. He was responsible for the first Sun Cluster HA 1.0 deployments in UK and now works as Staff Engineer for Sun's Solaris Cluster Engineering group. Tim has authored a number BluePrints and white papers including co-authoring "Designing Enterprise Solutions with Sun Cluster 3.0","Architecting Availability And Disaster Recovery Solutions", and "Sun Cluster 3.2 Software: Making Oracle Database 10G RAC Even More Unbreakable". Tim holds a B.Sc. in Physics, with Astrophysics from Birmingham University in the UK.
This Sun Blueprint spans the intersections of many Sun technologies. The author is grateful for the support he received while writing this document from a large number of colleagues including (in no particular order): Terry Smith, Ashutosh Tripathi, Alexandre Chartre, Neil Garthwaite, Detlef Ulherr, Thorsten Frueauf, Honsing Cheng, Steve McKinty, Binu Jose Philip, Michael Haines, Larry Kriewald, Andy Hisgen, Gia-Khanh Nguyen, Jonathan Edwards, Venkateswarlu Tella, Duncan Hardie, Jon Aimone, Oren Teich, Eve Kleinknecht, Kumar Loganathan, Richard Elling, Burt Clouse, Ellard Roush, Hartmut Streppel, Chris Dekanski, Charles Debardeleben, Joost Pronk, Liam Merwick, and Jeff Victor. He apologizes to anyone he missed.
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