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 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 administrator of the global zone.

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

• The orderly booting, shutdown and fault monitoring of a zone through the sczbt component.

• The orderly startup, shutdown and fault monitoring of an application within the zone, using scripts or commands through the sczsh component.

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

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

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

You can also choose to set up non-global zones that do not participate in the cluster. A root user logged into one of these zones is not able to discover or disrupt operation of the cluster. See Denying Cluster Services for a Non-Global Zone for more information. For instructions, see How to Deny Cluster Services For a Non-Global Zone in Oracle Solaris Cluster Data Services Planning and Administration Guide and How to Allow Cluster Services For a Non-Global Zone in Oracle Solaris Cluster Data Services Planning and Administration Guide

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