Solaris 10 5/08 Supports Legacy Containers, Xeon Features

Published: May 1, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Late last week, after we had put The Unix Guardian to bed and then moved on to coverage of other platforms, Sun Microsystems announced that it has rolled out an update of its Solaris 10 Unix for Sparc and X64 platforms. The update, which is known as Solaris 10 5/08 even though it is coming out in April, comes out about seven months after the prior 8/07 update, which actually hit in September 2007, not August. (Go figure.) Anyway, the 5/08 update has some important features that Solaris shops have wanted for some time.

First and foremost, the Solaris 10 5/08 update includes physical-to-virtual (or P2V in the server virtualization lingo) tool that allows for physical instances of Solaris 8 or Solaris 9 and their customer-specific application stacks to be wrapped up for a Solaris container and then dropped unchanged into a Solaris 10 container. This is an important technology as Sun tries to preserve its legacy Solaris customers from raids and incursions by its Unix, Linux, and even Windows competitors and helps ease the transition forward for Solaris shops. "This technology decouples the hardware upgrade from the software upgrade," explains Charlie Boyle, director of product marketing for Solaris at Sun, "which was, in fact, its design point."

The Solaris 8 and 9 P2V conversion tool for Solaris 10 containers is actually based on a revamped version of a tool that Sun debuted last year, called the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant. Sun's Professional Services organization created this tool for its own upgrade engagements, but the Solaris team productized this tool and wove it into the Solaris 10 distribution, making it usable by normal system administrators. (If there is such a thing, mind you.) In any event, Solaris 8 instances on X64 servers can now be moved to Solaris 10 containers with all of their files and configuration settings such that the applications inside the container do not even know they are not running on Solaris 10 and its underlying file system. (You can't move Solaris 9 for X86 to Solaris 10 containers because there was no Solaris 9 for X86.) Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 application stacks can be encapsulated by this tool--which Sun did not think to give a name for some reason--on Sparc-based machines and moved to Solaris 10 containers running on newer Sparc iron. The tool is not cross-platform, obviously, because applications compiled for the X86 and X64 processor cannot execute on Sparc iron, and visa versa. Sun could probably migrate the Solaris settings in an emptied X86 server to Sparc machines, or from Sparc to X64 machines, if that is useful. (I forgot to ask if this was possible, but it makes sense that it should be.)

The Solaris 10 container code inside the 5/08 update has also been tweaked to allow administrators to put an absolute cap on processor utilization for a container. This feature does have a name, and it is called CPU Capping.

The Solaris 10 5/08 update also includes some of the first fruits of the collaboration agreement between Intel and Sun, whose respective engineers have been working together to get Solaris 10 to make use of more of the hardware features embedded in modern Core architecture processors from Intel. Specifically, the 5/08 update includes support for the SpeedStep power management functions built into Xeon processors, which allow an operating system to set the conditions on applications and to scale back performance (and therefore power consumption) on parts of the Xeon processor. (SpeedStep was originally developed for laptop processors and when Intel knighted its laptop chips as the heart of the Core architecture two years ago, this valuable tech moved into X64 servers.)

Earlier versions of Solaris 10, thanks to a longer partnership with Advanced Micro Devices, already supports that company's PowerNow power governing technology for its Athlon and Opteron X64 processors. Incidentally, the 8/07 update for Solaris included support for the quad-core "Barcelona" and "Budapest" Opteron processors, the former of which are now making their way into Sun's and competitor's two-socket and four-socket systems and the latter of which are aimed at single-socket boxes and expected any day now.

Also new with the 5/08 update is support for fault management on Xeon chips, which is part of the predictive self-healing software capability that made its debut on Sparc iron with Solaris 10 over three years ago and which has been supported in AMD chips for a while. With predictive self healing, Solaris watches how electronic components are performing, and if a memory stick or a processor starts acting weird or failing, it can isolate that component and get the operating system and applications off of it without shutting down. Then, when the data center can afford the downtime, the system can be taken down and the component can be replaced. Obviously, such fault management becomes more useful (and vital) in a system comprised of multicore processors, and the fault management code in Solaris 10 can go very granular--down to the core level, in fact. This brings Xeon iron to parity with Sparc and Opteron iron, at least as far as fault management is concerned.

The Solaris 10 5/08 update is available for free, like all Solaris 10 releases, and as of this week is available on CD and DVD media as well as online, which is how it was distributed late last week.

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