Sun Cluster HA for Solaris Containers Overview

A Solaris Container is a complete runtime environment for applications. Solaris 10 Resource Manager and Solaris Zones software partitioning technology are both parts of the container. These components address different qualities the container can deliver and work together to create a complete container. The zones portion of the container provides a virtual mapping from the application to the platform resources. Zones allow application components to be isolated from one application even though the zones share a single instance of the Solaris Operating System. Resource management features permit you to allocate the quantity of resources that a workload receives.

The Solaris Zones facility in the Solaris Operating System provides an isolated and secure environment in which to run applications on your system. When you create a zone, you produce an application execution environment in which processes are isolated from the rest of the system.

This isolation prevents processes that are running in one zone from monitoring or affecting processes that are running in other zones. Even a process that is running with superuser credentials cannot view or affect activity in other zones. A zone also provides an abstract layer that separates applications from the physical attributes of the machine on which they are deployed. Examples of these attributes include physical device paths.

Every Solaris system contains a global zone. The global zone has a dual function. The global zone is both the default zone for the system and the zone that is used for system-wide administrative control. Non-global zones are referred to as zones and are created by the global administrator.

Sun Cluster HA for Solaris Containers enables Sun Cluster to manage Solaris Zones by providing components to perform the following operations:

• The orderly booting and shutdown of a zone

• The orderly startup, shutdown, and fault monitoring of an application within the zone via scripts or commands

• The orderly startup, shutdown, and fault monitoring of a Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF) service within the zone

You can configure Sun Cluster HA for Solaris Containers as a failover service or a multiple-masters service. You cannot configure Sun Cluster HA for Solaris Containers as a scalable service.

When a Solaris Zone is managed by the Sun Cluster HA for Solaris Containers data service, the Solaris Zone becomes a failover Solaris Zone, or multiple-masters Solaris Zone, across the Sun Cluster nodes. The failover is managed by the Sun Cluster HA for Solaris Containers data service, which runs only within the global zone.

For conceptual information about failover data services, multiple-masters data services, and scalable data services, see Sun Cluster Concepts Guide for Solaris OS.