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.

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.