Logical Domains with ZFS
Solaris Logical Domains (LDOMs) or, as it's now been christened, Oracle VM for SPARC, allows you to take any T-series processor based server and partition it into lots of fully isolated virtual servers. Unlike Solaris zones, there are no shared files. Each virtual machine gets it's own copy of Solaris! With Oracle VM Server for SPARC version 2.0, you can do lots of cool stuff also, like isolate access to a specific PCI slot to one LDOM. Here, I will outline a simple process for building LDOM's, using ZFS the storage infrastructure and then using the ZFS capabilities to clone and provision new LDOM's in a matter of minutes. The test system for this was Sun Oracle Enterprise T5220 with 8Gb of RAM and 8 x 146Gb hard drives. Two of the disks will be used to host the base OS and the remaining 6 will be used to create a ZFS RAID-Z pool to hold the LDOMs.
Preparing the host server, the Control Domain
1. Install Solaris 10 on your host system. You're a grown adult, so you decide on how you wan to partition it and what range of packages you want to install.
2. Download the Oracle VM Server for SPARC software from Oracle
3. Upload the software to your LDOM server, unpack and install
unzip V24253-01.zip cd OVM_Server_SPARC-2_0/Install/ ./install-ldm
You'll be asked if you want to configure the system now. I always prefer to do it manually later:
Select an option for configuration: y) Yes, launch the Configuration Assistant after install n) No thanks, I will configure the system manually later Enter y or n [y]: n
4. Reboot
shutdown -g0 -i6 -y
5. Create a virtual console concentrator to allow virtual console access to individual LDOMs
ldm add-vcc port-range=5000-5100 primary-vcc0 primary
6. Create a virtual disk server (vds) to allow virtual disk to be imported into LDOMs
ldm add-vds primary-vds0 primary
7. Create a virtual switch to allow the control domain to communicate to the LDOMs
ldm add-vsw net-dev=e1000g0 primary-vsw0 primary
8. View that the services have been created.
ldm list-services
