Service Management Facility

The Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF) enables you to run and administer applications as highly available and scalable resources. Like the Resource Group Manager (RGM), the SMF provides high availability and scalability, but for the Solaris Operating System.

Sun Cluster provides three proxy resource types that you can use to enable SMF services in a cluster. These resource types, SUNW.Proxy_SMF_failover, SUNW.Proxy_SMF_loadbalanced, and SUNW.Proxy_SMF_multimaster, enable you to run SMF services in a failover, scalable, and multi-master configuration, respectively. The SMF manages the availability of SMF services on a single node. The SMF uses the callback method execution model to run services.

The SMF also provides a set of administrative interfaces for monitoring and controlling services. These interfaces enable you to integrate your own SMF-controlled services into Sun Cluster. This capability eliminates the need to create new callback methods, rewrite existing callback methods, or update the SMF service manifest. You can include multiple SMF resources in a resource group and you can configure dependencies and affinities between them.

The SMF is responsible for starting, stopping, and restarting these services and managing their dependencies. Sun Cluster is responsible for managing the service in the cluster and for determining the nodes on which these services are to be started.

The SMF runs as a daemon, svc.startd, on each cluster node. The SMF daemon automatically starts and stops resources on selected nodes according to pre-configured policies.

The services that are specified for an SMF proxy resource can reside in a global zone or in a non-global zone. However, all the services that are specified for the same SMF proxy resource must be located in the same zone. SMF proxy resources work in any zone.