When to Use Solaris Resource Manager

Solaris Resource Manager can provide effective resource control in a variety of situations including server consolidation, Internet Service Provider (ISP) web hosting, batch processing, administering sites with large or varied user populations, and establishing policies to ensure that critical applications get the response time they require.

Server Consolidation

Solaris Resource Manager is ideal for environments that are consolidating multiple applications on a single server. The cost and complexity of managing numerous machines encourages system managers to consolidate applications on larger, more scalable systems. With Solaris Resource Manager, it's easy to achieve these economies of scale.

As an example, a single Sun server could provide application, file, and print services for heterogeneous clients, messaging/mail service, web service, and mission-critical database applications. Since Sun Enterprise^TM servers scale from 1 to 64 processors, one server could be configured for several departments to share or for an entire enterprise to use. In other server consolidation efforts, the development, prototype, and production environments are combined on a single large machine such as the Sun Enterprise 10000 or Sun Enterprise 6500, rather than being hosted on three separate servers. Still other consolidation projects combine database and application servers within a single machine, or multiple data marts. Regardless of the application type or configuration, Solaris Resource Manager helps ensure that the system's resources are allocated among all users, applications, and groups according to the defined policy. Critical applications are protected because they are guaranteed the share of the available system resources they need.

Web Hosting

In the past, ISPs have had to assign dedicated machines to each client, at significant cost and complexity. With Solaris Resource Manager, an ISP can confidently host many (perhaps thousands) of web servers on a single machine. Solaris Resource Manager allows administrators to control the resource consumption associated with each web site, protecting each from the potential excesses of the others. It also prevents a faulty common gateway interface (CGI) script from exhausting CPU resources, or a user application from leaking all available virtual memory.

Batch Processing

Solaris Resource Manager can be used to prevent batch workloads from impacting ongoing business activities as well as other batch jobs running concurrently.

Large or Varied User Population

Solaris Resource Manager can help manage resources in any system that has a large and diverse user base, such as an educational institution. (In fact, Solaris Resource Manager has its roots in an early CPU resource scheduler developed at the Universities of Sydney and New South Wales.) Where there is a mix of workloads, the Solaris Resource Manager software can be configured to favor certain users. For example, in large brokerage firms, traders intermittently require fast access to execute a query or perform a calculation. Other system users, however, have more consistent workloads. If the traders are granted a proportionately larger amount of processing power, Solaris Resource Manager ensures that they will have the responsiveness they need.