System Administration Guide: Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Solaris Zones

Preface

System Administration Guide: Solaris Containers--Resource Management, and Solaris Zones is part of a multivolume set that covers a significant part of the Solaris™ Operating System administration information. This book assumes that you have already installed the operating system and set up any networking software that you plan to use.

Note - This Solaris release supports systems that use the SPARC® and x86 families of processor architectures: UltraSPARC®, SPARC64, AMD64, Pentium, and Xeon EM64T. The supported systems appear in the Solaris 10 Hardware Compatibility List at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl. This document cites any implementation differences between the platform types.

About Solaris Containers

A Solaris Container is a complete runtime environment for applications. Solaris Resource Manager and Solaris Zones software partitioning technology are both parts of the container. These components address different qualities the container can deliver and work together to create a complete container. The zones portion of the container provides a virtual mapping from the application to the platform resources. Zones allow application components to be isolated from one another even though the zones share a single instance of the Solaris Operating System. Resource management features permit you to allocate the quantity of resources that a workload receives.

The container establishes boundaries for resource consumption, such as CPU. These boundaries can be expanded to adapt to changing processing requirements of the application running in the container.

About Solaris Containers for Linux Applications

Solaris Containers for Linux Applications use Sun's BrandZ technology to run Linux applications on the Solaris Operating System. Linux applications run unmodified in the secure environment provided by the non-global zone feature. This enables you to use the Solaris system to develop, test, and deploy Linux applications.

To use this feature, see Part III, Branded Zones.

Who Should Use This Book

This book is intended for anyone responsible for administering one or more systems that run the Solaris release. To use this book, you should have at least one to two years of UNIX® system administration experience.

How the System Administration Volumes Are Organized

Here is a list of the topics that are covered by the volumes of the System Administration Guides.

Book Title	Topics
System Administration Guide: Basic Administration	User accounts and groups, server and client support, shutting down and booting a system, managing services, and managing software (packages and patches)
System Administration Guide: Advanced Administration	Printing services, terminals and modems, system resources (disk quotas, accounting, and crontabs), system processes, and troubleshooting Solaris software problems
System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems	Removable media, disks and devices, file systems, and backing up and restoring data
System Administration Guide: IP Services	TCP/IP network administration, IPv4 and IPv6 address administration, DHCP, IPsec, IKE, IP filter, Mobile IP, IP network multipathing (IPMP), and IPQoS
System Administration Guide: Naming and Directory Services (DNS, NIS, and LDAP)	DNS, NIS, and LDAP naming and directory services, including transitioning from NIS to LDAP and transitioning from NIS+ to LDAP
System Administration Guide: Naming and Directory Services (NIS+)	NIS+ naming and directory services
System Administration Guide: Network Services	Web cache servers, time-related services, network file systems (NFS and Autofs), mail, SLP, and PPP
System Administration Guide: Security Services	Auditing, device management, file security, BART, Kerberos services, PAM, Solaris cryptographic framework, privileges, RBAC, SASL, and Solaris Secure Shell
System Administration Guide: Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Solaris Zones	Resource management topics projects and tasks, extended accounting, resource controls, fair share scheduler (FSS), physical memory control using the resource capping daemon (`rcapd`), and resource pools; virtualization using Solaris Zones software partitioning technology and `lx` branded zones
Solaris ZFS Administration Guide	ZFS storage pool and file system creation and management, snapshots, clones, backups, using access control lists (ACLs) to protect ZFS files, using Solaris ZFS on a Solaris system with zones installed, emulated volumes, and troubleshooting and data recovery

Related Books

Solaris Containers: Resource Management and Solaris Zones Developer's Guide describes how to write applications that partition and manage system resources and discusses which APIs to use. Programming examples and a discussion of programming issues to consider when writing an application are also provided.

Documentation, Support, and Training

The Sun web site provides information about the following additional resources:

Typographic Conventions

The following table describes the typographic conventions that are used in this book.

Table P-1 Typographic Conventions

Typeface or Symbol	Meaning	Example
`AaBbCc123`	The names of commands, files, and directories, and onscreen computer output	Edit your `.login` file. Use `ls -a` to list all files. `machine_name% you have mail.`
`AaBbCc123`	What you type, contrasted with onscreen computer output	`machine_name%` `su` `Password:`
aabbcc123	Placeholder: replace with a real name or value	The command to remove a file is `rm` filename.
AaBbCc123	Book titles, new terms, and terms to be emphasized	Read Chapter 6 in the User's Guide. A cache is a copy that is stored locally. Do not save the file. Note: Some emphasized items appear bold online.

Shell Prompts in Command Examples

The following table shows the default UNIX system prompt and superuser prompt for the C shell, Bourne shell, and Korn shell.

Table P-2 Shell Prompts

Shell	Prompt
C shell	`machine_name%`
C shell for superuser	`machine_name#`
Bourne shell and Korn shell	`$`
Bourne shell and Korn shell for superuser	`#`