Re: Solaris 11 Zones Anyone?

  • From: De DBA <dedba@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 09 Dec 2013 15:49:05 +1000

This used to be the case in Solaris 10, but in my experience Solaris 11 zones 
are more like specialised chroot jails than VMWare-like virtual machines. All 
running processes can be seen in the global zone. Perhaps AIX LPARs are 
similar.. This is the reason that in Solaris 11, the zones and the global zone 
(root zone) must always run the same version of the Solaris 11 software (no 
rolling OS upgrades..). Solaris 10 is supported with a compatibility emulator 
only, not with the actual Solaris 10 kernel.

I've installed Oracle in both Solaris 10 and native zones on Solaris11 , it is 
quite straight-forward as you would expect.

Hth,
Tony

On 05/12/13 12:22, Keith Moore wrote:
Yes, each zone is it's own separate environment. There is a global zone as well 
that in our environment the DBAs do not have access to. Different technologies 
but the end result is very similar to VMware or other virtualized environments. 
From within a zone you cannot see the other zones or even know they exist.

We are on Solaris 10 and have seen some weirdness where at low loads some 
utilities such as uptime and sar show results for the zone only (as they 
should) but under high load show results for the entire physical server. Don't 
know if that's been fixed in Solaris 11 or not.

Keith

On Dec 4, 2013, at 5:29 PM, Chris Taylor wrote:

We're getting started on Solaris 11 and using zones and I'm not familiar with 
installing Oracle inside a zone.

Is a zone basically a standard solaris installation running "virtualized"?  In 
other words, for each zone, do we setup the necessary limits and parameters using the 
Solaris installation guide - pre-installation tasks? Or is that handled at the main 
server layer and replicated down to the zones?

My initial reading suggests that each zone is a standalone operating system in a 
"virtualized" environment but I'm not sure.  (Also, is "virtualized" the right 
term for a zone in this context?)

Thanks,
Chris



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