Before Using Container Manager

Before installing and using the Container Manager software, assess your resource consumption needs. As part of the container creation process, you provide a minimum CPU reservation and optionally a physical memory cap for the processes that will run inside the container. The container creation process is easier if you have already evaluated your needs, developed your goals, and have a resource plan in place. Additionally, a master list of the specifications of all the hardware involved is also useful before you begin.

Server Consolidation

A key component of a successful server consolidation is a master list of all the servers, storage, and applications that are candidates for consolidation. After you have finalized your consolidation plan, you can begin to implement the plan with this list.

If you intend to perform a server consolidation in your data center, you need to perform several tasks before installing and using the Container Manager software. A partial list of tasks to be performed includes the following:

1. Choose the applications to consolidate.

2. Identify the components, such as processes, groups of users, or users that make up the workload for the application.

3. Determine the performance requirements for each defined workload. This task involves monitoring the real-time activity of the application on the current system, including CPU, memory, network, and storage requirements and usage. You also need to determine which types of file systems, shared file systems, and shared libraries the workloads use to configure the new system and to share resources efficiently, such as read-only file systems, libraries, and man pages.

4. Rank the workloads that are to share the system resources by which applications require the most resources and the time periods they need them. You also need to identify competing workloads that are housed on the same systems.

5. Identify the projects for these workloads. The project serves as the administrative name that is used to group related work in a manner you deem useful. For example, you might have a project for a web services and a project for database services.

Although the Solaris Operating System can have thousands of containers, for practical purposes and best performance, we recommend that you have no more than 200 hosts with approximately 10 zones per host and 10 projects per zone.

For more information about how to plan and execute a server consolidation, you can read the Sun Blueprints book Consolidation in the Data Center by David Hornby and Ken Pepple.