Dynamic Intimate Shared Memory (DISM) is not supported for use on SPARC SuperCluster Solaris environments in instances other than the ASM instance. The use of DISM on the SPARC SuperCluster outside of the ASM instance can lead to several different issues ranging form excessive swap usage (even when memory is available) to kernel panics to performance problems. It has been determined that the ASM instance is typically such a small memory footprint that it should not cause an issue.
This behavior is typically occurs on instances created after installation, because Solaris 11 uses Automatic Memory Management by default. To prevent this DISM issue when creating Solaris 11 instances, disable DISM. For more information see: Disable DISM.
To decide if DISM is appropriate for your environment, and for more information about using DISM with an Oracle database, refer to the Oracle white paper “Dynamic SGA Tuning of Oracle Database on Oracle Solaris with DISM”: