Deduplication with zones

One of the major strengths of zones in Solaris is that they are very lightweight, since they share the same kernel they have low CPU, I/O and memory overhead. In Solaris 10 the ability to create "sparse" zones is available, with this option the local zones created shares most of the binaries and libraries with the global zone. This does not only save space, it also saves memory since all zones share the same instances of common binaries and libraries. The downside of sparse zones is that they have a very strong relationship with the global zone and no modifications unique to any zone can be made to the shared filesystems.

In OpenSolaris and later updates of Solaris 10 the ability to clone a zone is available. A zone is installed on a ZFS filesystem of which a clone is created for every new zone. Only minor modifications are made to the cloned filesystem to give the zone it's unique identity. This works much like deduplication until you patch or upgrade the system, which will make all the clones contain their own copies of the new data even if it's common to other zone instances.

Sparse zones are not supported by the new packaging system in OpenSolaris and it might never be. But zones in OpenSolaris only installs a very basic set of packages, which makes a clean install of a zone very small to begin with, they can then be placed on a compressed filesystem, and in OpenSolaris 2010.03 this filesystem can also be deduplicated.

I've done a small test to see how much space will be used by every zone instance with both compression and deduplication. These are freshly installed zones with have been booted once so that everything have been initialized in the zones:

A single zone on a LZJB compressed and deduped ZFS filsystem:

NAME     SIZE  ALLOC   FREE    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
zdup01  9.94G   241M  9.70G     2%  1.01x  ONLINE  -

Two zones:

NAME     SIZE  ALLOC   FREE    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
zdup01  9.94G   253M  9.69G     2%  1.99x  ONLINE  -

Three zones:

NAME     SIZE  ALLOC   FREE    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
zdup01  9.94G   263M  9.68G     2%  2.96x  ONLINE  -

So every zone uses a little more than 10MB of disk space and with deduplication you also get the same benefits in memory footprint as a with a sparse zone since there is only one deduplicated instance of Solaris libraries and binaries for the zones. They are however not shared with the global zone, since it boots from a separate pool without compression and deduplication. Unlike zones on a cloned ZFS filesystem the deduplication will continue to work after upgrading the zones and for software added to the zone from for example the pkg repositories post install time.

It looks like I can continue continue to run 20 zones on my thirteen year old Ultra 2 workhorse even if I upgrade it to OpenSolaris one day.