Zone Clusters - How to Deploy Virtual Clusters and Why 
by Ellard Roush
March 2009
Virtualization technologies provide a safe way to consolidate multiple applications on a single system. This paper introduces the zone cluster, a virtual cluster in which a Solaris™ OS Zone is configured as a virtual node. The zone cluster supports the consolidation of multiple cluster applications on a single cluster.
This paper addresses the following topics:
• "Cluster application consolidation" presents the forces driving consolidation.
• "Server virtualization technologies" provides an overview of Sun's virtualization technologies, with an emphasis on Solaris Zones.
• "Zone cluster overview" introduces the zone cluster and further identifies numerous use cases that demonstrate its utility.
• "Zone cluster design" describes the overall design of the zone cluster.
• "Administration overview" provides an overview of zone cluster administration.
• "Example zone cluster configuration" contains step-by-step instructions for an example zone cluster configuration.
• "Zone cluster administration" describes common zone cluster administrative tasks.
Contents
- Cluster application consolidation
- Server virtualization technologies
- Hardware partitions
- Virtual machines
- Operating system virtualization
- Resource management
- Selecting a server virtualization approach
- Zone cluster overview
- Cluster terminology
- Global clusters and zone clusters
- Security isolation
- Application fault isolation
- Resource management
- Dedicated cluster model
- Zone cluster use cases
- Multiple organization consolidation
- Functional consolidation
- Multiple-tier consolidation
- Cost containment
- Administrative workload reduction
- Zone cluster design
- Virtual node
- Cluster membership
- Security
- File systems
- Storage devices
- Networks
- Administration overview
- Zone cluster administration
- Application administration
- Example zone cluster configuration
- Preliminary configuration
- Zone cluster configuration
- Zone cluster administration
- Node and cluster-wide scope
- System identification
- Node support
- File system support
- Storage device support
- Networking support
- Boot and halt operations
- Delete operation
- Displaying zone cluster information
- Clone operation
- Other zone subcommands
- Solaris OS command interaction
- Zone cluster administrative GUIs
- Summary
- About the author
- Acknowledgements
- References
- Ordering Sun documents
- Accessing Sun documentation online
Dr. Ellard Roush is the Technical Lead for the Solaris Cluster Infrastructure Group. He is the architect for the zone clusters project. This is just one of many projects that have ranged across many areas, including: membership, upgrade technology, and cluster file systems. He earned the Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.
The development of the zone cluster feature was done by the project team, and recognition must be extended to all team members who contributed in a variety of ways: Zoram Thanga, Pramod Nandana, Tirthankar Das, Sambit Nayak, Himanshu Ashiya, Varun Balegar, Prasanna Kunisetty, Gia-Khanh Nguyen, Robert Bart, Suraj Verma, Harish Mallya, Ritu Agrawal, Madhan Balasubramanian, Ganesh RamNagarajan, Bharathi Subramanian, Thorsten Frueauf, Charles Debardeleben, Venkateswarlu Tella, Hai-Yi Cheng, Lina Muryanto, Jagrithi Buddharaja, Nils Pedersen, and Burt Clouse.
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Comments (1)
Apr 07, 2009
bhudsonjr says:
While the concepts of clustering within the OS virtual space are interesting, th...While the concepts of clustering within the OS virtual space are interesting, the practicality of managing such environments is limited. Most real world clusters require different sets of kernel parameters to be tuned for specific applications/databases. For this reason, the practicality of zone clusters is somewhat limited since all zones operate on the same set of kernel parameters. It would be better to extend the focus on clusters to logical domains as that environment better represents current clustering practices and also allows the use of third party clustering products (Veritas CVM/CFS).