System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System

Scheduling Class in a Zone

You can use the fair share scheduler (FSS) to control the allocation of available CPU resources among zones, based on the importance of the workloads in the zone. This importance is expressed by the number of shares of CPU resources that you assign to each zone. Even if you are not using FSS to manage CPU resource allocation between zones, you can set the zone's scheduling-class to use FSS so that you can set shares on projects within the zone.

When you explicitly set the cpu-shares property, the fair share scheduler (FSS) will be used as the scheduling class for that zone. However, the preferred way to use FSS in this case is to set FSS to be the system default scheduling class with the dispadmin command. That way, all zones will benefit from getting a fair share of the system CPU resources. If cpu-shares is not set for a zone, the zone will use the system default scheduling class. The following actions set the scheduling class for a zone:

Note that you can use the priocntl described in the priocntl(1) man page to move running processes into a different scheduling class without changing the default scheduling class and rebooting.