Migration Restrictions for Silicon Secured Memory Servers

SPARC servers starting with the SPARC M7, SPARC T7, and SPARC S7 series server support a hardware capability called Silicon Secured Memory (SSM). When enabled through the Application Data Integrity (ADI) API, this feature enables software to assign versions to regions of memory. These versions are used to detect invalid or unauthorized memory accesses. These version tags are part of the guest virtual machine state and are migrated with the guest domain.

For more information about SSM and the ADI API, see Software in Silicon: Enabling Secure Clouds for the Real-Time Enterprise (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/sun-sparc-enterprise/documentation/sparc-t7-m7-server-architecture-2702877.pdf) and Using Application Data Integrity (ADI) in Oracle Solaris 11.4 Programming Interfaces Guide.

You can perform only a migration that preserves ADI tags between servers of the same CPU family. For example, you can perform a migration that preserves ADI tags from a SPARC M7 series server to another SPARC M7 series server or to a SPARC T7 series server. Or, you can perform a migration that preserves ADI tags from a SPARC T8 series server to another SPARC T8 series server or to a SPARC M8 series server.

Caution:

If you intend to perform a domain migration on your servers that support SSM, ensure that they run at least the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.5 software. When running previous versions of the Oracle VM Server for SPARC software on servers that support SSM, ADI version information is not migrated to the target machine. This situation can result in undefined application behavior if ADI is in use in the domain being migrated.

While it is best to run the latest version of the Oracle VM Server for SPARC software on all SSM-capable machines used in a migration, if an upgrade is not possible on either the source machine or the target machine, you can still perform a migration if you are certain that the domain to be migrated does not use ADI versioning.

To perform this sort of migration, set the ldmd/migration_adi_legacy_compat SMF property value to true on the machine that runs Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.5. By setting this property, the migration overrides the support checks and permits the migration to proceed. The migrated domain does not retain the ADI version tags.