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Installing and Administering Solaris Container Manager 3.6.1

New Features and Changes in Solaris Container Manager 3.6 and 3.6.1

Solaris Container Manager has the following new features, which vary with operating systems.

Table 1–1 New Features in Solaris Container Manager 3.6

Benefit 

Feature 

Solaris 10 (SPARC and x86) 

Solaris 9 (SPARC and x86) 

Solaris 8 (SPARC) 

Run processes in isolation and virtual OS environments 

Zone management 

Yes 

   

Set and obtain system performance goals 

Dynamic resource pools 

Yes 

   

Avoid network congestion 

Internet Protocol Quality of Service (IPQoS) 

Yes 

   

More flexible process management 

Ability to move process across containers 

Yes 

Yes 

 

Timesharing scheduler support 

Support of other scheduler class 

Yes 

Yes 

Yes 

Better visualization tools 

Graph enhancement 

Yes 

Yes 

Yes 

Zone-aware containers with memory allocation 

Container enhancement 

Yes 

Yes 

Yes 

Utilization report for top 5 resource objects 

Graph enhancement 

Yes 

Yes 

Yes 

In Solaris Container Manager 3.6.1, Zone Copy feature has been enhanced. You can create multiple copies of a non-global zone on a single host or a copy of a non-global zone on multiple hosts. For information about this, see Copying Non-Global Zones in Chapter 6, Managing Zones.

Zone Management

Container Manager enables you to create, delete, modify, halt, and reboot non-global zones. Container Manager also can discover existing zones, detect zone changes, monitor and archive a zone's CPU, memory and network utilization, and generate zone up/down alarms.

For more information about zones, see Chapter 6, Managing Zones.

Dynamic Resource Pools

Dynamic resource pools dynamically adjust the resource allocation of each resource pool to meet established system performance goals. Dynamic resource pools simplify and reduce the number of decisions required from a system administrator. Adjustments are automatically made to preserve the system performance goals specified by a system administrator.

You can create, modify, and delete dynamic resource pools for Solaris 10 systems. After you configure dynamic resource pool constraints, such as the minimum and maximum CPUs, utilization objective, locality objective, and CPU share, the Container Manager agent dynamically adjusts the pool size to the conditions of resource availability and consumption.

Resource pool configuration is saved on both the agent and service database.

Bandwidth Control Using IPQoS

The IP quality-of-service feature helps you to provide consistent levels of services to network users and to manage network traffic. The service enables you to rank, control, and gather network statistics.

This feature controls inbound and outbound traffic of a Solaris zone. You specify the upper limit of the zone's input/output network bandwidth. The package is dropped if the limit is exceeded. Because IPQoS has a fair amount of CPU overhead, this is an optional feature.

Container Manager monitors and gathers work utilization data and provides a historical network utilization graph.

Flexible Process Management

To increase process management flexibility, Container Manager 3.6 enables you to move processes from container to container. For Solaris 9 systems, you can move processes across containers. For Solaris 10 systems, you can move processes across containers only within the same zone.

Timesharing Scheduler

Container Manager 1.0 supported the fair share scheduler (FSS) only. Container Manager 3.6 allows you to select the scheduler class, fair share or timesharing, when you create or modify a resource pool. The scheduler class determines the process priority, deciding which process runs next.

After you change a resource pool's scheduler class, any new processes for that resource pool changes to the resource pool's scheduler class. Container Manager does not change the scheduler class of a running process.

Container Enhancements

Container Manager includes the following enhancements to containers: