Solaris

Good morning to one and all :-)

About to set up a M5000 server, then create a few zones to port over a few apps.

So, anyone had experience of zones ? and what things I need to consider / design / workout before hand ??

I need to work out whats going to be ported over, what the ip requirements are, storage requirements, hostnames, etc etc

Any ideas ? I want to be fully prepared before the server arrives.

Cheers all

Simon :-)

check the admin guide at docs.sun.com and the best practices at sun.com/bigadmin.

Cheers Duke. I have read those docs articles already, and they tend to give you a general approachand advice. Was more aiming for some realtime experience and what SA's that have used / administered zones might recommend.

There's the docs.sun world, and then there's the real SA world :-)

Thanks for replying.

Cheers

SBK

nobody can tell you what you should do... everything depends on what you want to do... if you've problems later on, you'll find help here.
but i don't think the guys will make planning basics for you...

duke is correct. we can't really help you in this nature as your applications are unique to you. best advice is (if you can) run a test run on zones. what you will find is zones are very easy to manage. the sun docs are extremely effectively and showing you what you can do. m5000 will handle your request.

Personally, I don't use zones. Zone are just a way to create a virtual host on old HW.
If I'm using an M-series box, I use HW domains.
If I have a need for small virtual hosts, LDOMs on a cheap T-series box are the way to go.

Hi,

Cool, no probs. I was merely asking in regards to general advice, or things you've learnt that if you had to do it all again, you would do differently. I appiecate that it all depends on my apps.

From reading various docs, Im going down the whole root zone, as I have plenty of local disk space. Im going to run about 6 zones tops. 4 of these will be oracle db's, and 4 of the zones will be branded with sol8 or 9.

As for Nics, well Ive got to quad cards, so will be working out if I need to VLAN / trunking, again depends on the app requirements and network addresses. At the moment I plan to ipmp 2 ports for the Global Zone, 2 more for the a backup network, the last four for either trunking or vlan. Can ipmp devices that you have trunked ? or do I need two truncks then ipmp them?

Going to use the onbaord nic, lets call ti ce0, for all the managment NIIC's of the zones.

What Im more unclear at, is zone names, best naming for the zone roots, ie. /export/local-zones/hq-db1-sol8-zone1 i.e. naming policy.

Also, little unclear on whether I should allocation 1 or 2 cpus to one zone, and Fair share policy the others, ?(server have 4 cpus / 2 system boards) or just FSS the lot ? Not sure the pros cons of this.


Cheers for your replies gents :-)

SBK