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Installing and Administering N1 Grid Console - Container Manager 1.0

Container Manager Overview

Container Manager is an add-on software product to the Sun Management Center 3.5 Update 1 release. The software organizes existing resource management utilities that run on the SolarisTM 8 and Solaris 9 Operating Systems. Specifically, this release provides tools to simplify the configuration of Solaris Resource Manager 1.3 and Solaris 9 Resource Manager. The ability to manage resources with these utilities is useful when undergoing a server consolidation project. Once your consolidation project is completed, this release also provides tools to do the following tasks:

For more information about the Solaris resource management utilities, see Solaris Resource Manager 1.3 System Administration Guide and System Administration Guide: Resource Management and Network Services.

This release is a resource management application that helps you prevent contention for resource consumption between software applications. The Container Manager software enables the control of the amount of central processor units (CPUs) and physical memory allocated for use by each software application. This ability is achieved, in part, with the use of a container.

A container helps organize and manage the system resources that a service requires. The service is delivered by an application, which is a workload to the system. Using containers enables you to customize the workload environment, and control the level of resources delivered so that an application can perform according to need. You specify in each container the amounts of CPU and physical memory resources you want to allocate for each application. Resource contention between applications running on the same host is limited because you specify minimum CPU and maximum memory resource levels for each application. With this container management application, you are able to accomplish the following tasks:

The ability to establish resource levels is similar to reserving resources for use by an application. For example, if an application is running by itself in a container, the application can use any unused CPU resources available, even if that amount exceeds the minimum CPU reservation. When more than one application is running on a host, each in its own container, the resource reservations take effect and contention for CPU resources is limited. Each application will be guaranteed the minimum CPU reservation established for the container in which that application runs.

When a container's maximum memory limit, or memory cap, is exceeded, the system tries to page out the memory in order to limit the amount used to the capped value. The rcapd daemon is used for enforcing memory caps. For more information about memory capping and how the rcapd daemon works, see “Physical Memory Management Using the Resource Capping Daemon” in Solaris Resource Manager 1.3 System Administration Guide. For more information about how CPU resources are allocated and how the fair share scheduling class works, see “Fair Share Scheduler” in System Administration Guide: Resource Management and Network Services.

Establishing resource constraints for applications avoids the overutilization of system resources by one application. This ability to constrain resource consumption prevents another application from being starved for system resources such as CPU and memory.

Resource management tools such as Container Manager are useful in implementing server consolidation in your data center. Server consolidation produces the following benefits:

You must develop your server consolidation plan before you install the Container Manager software. For more information, see Before Using Container Manager.