To Zone or not to Zone

Question

Hi,
I am studying up on Zones, Containers, LDOMs and anything else they want to make up along the way. I have a Blade 6000 that I am about to set up and I want to know what is really the best way to set it up with the following goals and configuration in mind:
1. Blade 6000 with 2 - T6300 (T1 Processor) server modules
2. Will be buying possibly the StorageTek Array 2540 Fiber interface disk array with 2 FC cards
3. Have various applications like Cool Stack (SAMP) that runs an internally used web based application
4. Will be running an e-commerce site as well in a couple of months but may have to buy a Opteron based server module since Bozos built it on .ASP (Microsucks) environment.
5. Want to use first T6300 for production and the second for failover/pre production environment. The second one will allow me to iron out details of all upgrades, or software products that I might want to experiment with and in case something happens to the first one, provide failover. I assume Sun Clustering software would have to be installed for this.
6. Plan on using ZFS since it's way cool and easy in a RAID 5 config.
7. Would like to assign resources to various applications/solutions to provide minimal resources to lower priority applications/solutions like internal web app. versus high priority e-commerce web app.
For those who aren't up on Cool Stack, it is Solaris, Apache, MySQL and PHP (SAMP) that has been preconfigured for easy set up and tuned for Solaris.
I was told by a Sun rep that I might want to consider using LDOMs in lieu of Zones and also use the failover option for Sun Clustering versus the speed boost configuration. He said that the speed boost version of Sun Clustering has little use for applications that can't take advantage of it. My assumption was that it would operate similar to RAC for Oracle in that, when you add a node it got faster and even more fail safe. I didn't know you had to choose between speed and high availability.
Questions:
1. Why use LDOMS as opposed to Zones
2. Can you briefly explain how Zones, LDOMs and Containers compare to each other and when and how each are used
3. Can I install Solaris on both T6300s and bind them together somehow to form a Cluster
4. Is there a dependency of one to the other? Do you have to install one before the other?
5. Is there a document that compares LDOMs, Container, Zones, Sun Clustering and shows how to plan an installation
My apologies for so many questions at one time but I am researching and studying the best approach and I haven't seen documentation that does a good job of pulling it all together.

Answer 1

sunfan wrote:
1. Why use LDOMS as opposed to ZonesHmm. That's kind of a general trade-off. I don't see one as better than the other. They do somewhat different things.
2. Can you briefly explain how Zones, LDOMs and Containers compare to each other and when and how each are usedLDOMs are like fully virtual machines, assisted by hardware. You can (must) run a separate operating system in each domain. This gives you a significant amount of flexibility, but there can be some performance trade-offs. Also, you'll select hardware components and assign them to a specific LDOM.
Zones/Containers are a Solaris construct to restrict how things run. They have some aspects of virtual machines (processes don't see processes in other zones, independent IP addresses, etc...), but they have some restrictions as well. However they can be much lighter-weight than a full VM because you're not running a separate OS in each case. In the case of sparse zones, you might be able to run many more zones than you could LDOMs. By default all hardware components are shared across all zones, but you can enable resource restrictions to assign or limit CPU and memory in particular zones.
3. Can I install Solaris on both T6300s and bind them together somehow to form a ClusterIt depends on what you mean by "bind", and it depends on the application you want to run.
You can use cluster software (like SunCluster) to set up failover between different machines, blades, LDOMs, and zones. But if you want an application to run on them simultaneously, that depends on the application and how it supports clusters.
4. Is there a dependency of one to the other? Do you have to install one before the other?I'm not sure which you're referring to here. But no, not really. A cluster, an LDOM, and a Zone are all independent constructs.
5. Is there a document that compares LDOMs, Container, Zones, Sun Clustering and shows how to plan an installationHere's a blueprint on some of the virtualization techniques.
http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0807/820-3023.html
Darren