The evolution of Solaris 10 zones

Solaris zones or Solaris containers dependent on where you work and how you use it have been available in since the initial release of Solaris 10 in 2005. It has worked well for isolating workloads and creating virtual execution environments inside a single kernel with minimal overhead. There have however been a few bumps along the way, especially when it comes to patches and upgrades. With the new Solaris 10 9/10 I feel that most of the problems have been solved so here is a summary of the road behind us.

The upgrade scenario for zones was all but forgotten at the time of the first Solaris 10 release and the first update only supported upgrades when booting from DVD and no live upgrade support.

Sun however realized that this was quite a problem for both them and their customers, so project ZULU was created to solve the problem (Zones Upgrade Live Upgrade, PSARC/2006/167).

ZULU was delivered with Solaris 10 update 4 which was the first release to support real upgrades of zones including live upgrade, but ZFS was still not supported as underlying filesystem for zones and live upgrade did not know how to handle such zones.

ZFS is a key component for easy live upgrade of zones. With zones on ZFS there is no need to copy all OS/Zone instances to a separate filesystem, possible requiring additional disks and overhead of administration. Live upgrade creates a ZFS clone of the needed filesystems and uses them for the upgrade. The support for Zones on ZFS was delivered with Solaris 10 10/08 (Update 6).

Live upgrade was only part of the solution, if you where unable to use live upgrade or if you where forced to have customer applications down even with live upgrade you where still in trouble. The largest problem was the time it took to update a system with many zones, it could take days(!) to update a system with, lets say 30 zones on it. The upgrade/patching process was sequential and on top of that is was very time consuming. This has today been fixed by a couple of enhancements, we now have zones parallel patching that enables several zones to be patched in parallel. The package system have also been updated with "Turbo charged SVR4 packages" making it faster, especially for zone installations and upgrades.

Lastly there is the "update on attach" function making it possible to move zones to a updated machine (or detach the zones and upgrade the current host) then have them updated in parallel when attached to the system with the new OS/patch level. The "update on attach" functionality was delivered in two steps, the first one made sure the zone was in the minimum supported state for running on the host. The second step which came with the latest update of Solaris delivers something more like what most customers would want, all packages are updated which makes it more like an upgrade.

In short, you are implementing zones today, use Solaris 10 9/10, put all zones on ZFS and use Live Upgrade/Update on attach. This will make it easy to upgrade while minimize both the time for the upgrade and the downtime.

Short history of Zone features in Solaris updates:

Solaris 10 11/06 (Update 3)
Zone renaming
Zone move and clone
zone attach/detach
Privileges in zone configuration

Solaris 10 8/07 (Update 4)
Upgrades, Live upgrades (ZULU)
IP Instances (dedicated NIC/separate TCP/IP stack)
Resource setting for memory/CPU

Solaris 10 5/08 (Update 5)
Dry run of zone migration (zoneadm -n)
CPU caps for zones

Solaris 10 10/08 (Update 6)
Update on attach
Default router in shared stack
Full ZFS support for zones

Solaris 10 10/09 (Update 8)
Turbo-Charged SVR4 Packaging
Zones Parallel Patching

Solaris 10 9/10 (Update 9)
Zones P2V (Physical to Virtual)
Host ID Emulation
"Upgrade on attach"

Jerry's blog Zones P2V
Patching zones goes zoom
PSARC/2009/173 Turbo-charging SVr4 package install

Solaris 10 9/10 released

I have had several posts about Solaris 9/10 this year and today it was finally released. I'm happy to report that my predictions regarding the content was very accurate. I'we included links to my earlier post, but in short it contains a large ZFS update, several new features for Solaris zones, JDK 1.6 and along overdue update to several desktop tools such as Firefox and Thunderbird.

Oracle also released Solaris Cluster 3.3 and Solaris Studio 12.2 today.

Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 What's new

My earlier post on the release:

Solaris 10 9/10 and second zfs refresh

First hints on Solaris 10 update 9

Desktop updates for Solaris 10 update 9

Thoughts on the future direction of Solaris

As a response in a discussion weather Oracle will invest more in Solaris 10 maybe to also use as base for Fishworks or what they doing I wrote something similiar to this in the opensolaris-discuss list:

Solaris 10 Update 9 will indeed contain some new features including a refresh of ZFS, but it will not replace the OpenSolaris kernel in Fishworks, backporting both the CIFS server and COMSTAR is far to much work.

I think Solaris 10 9/10 will be released at OpenWorld together with at least a preview of "Solaris Next", "Solaris 11" or whatever name it will get. Solaris 10 is too old to be doing major development work in, it is time to release a major version soon, some things can't be done without a new major release. This would look good for Oracle and their commitment to Solaris (not OpenSolaris), that they have a new major Solaris release where Sun just keep developing it for year after year (I'm not saying that was bad, but Oracle may put it like that, look at what Larry said about Rock).

What happens with OpenSolaris as a distribution is unclear, my opinion is that they should have released the second respin on 134 without support at least, now they just get bad will from the community, at least until something is released or they decide to spread some light on the situation.

Solaris next not OpenSolaris
Solaris 10 9/10 and second zfs refresh

Larry regarding Rock:
"At the start, ellison shut down one of schwartz’s pet projects -- development of the “rock” microprocessor for sun’s high-end sparc server line, a semiconductor that had struggled in development for five years as engineers sought to overcome a string of technical problems. “this processor had two incredible virtues: it was incredibly slow and it consumed vast amounts of energy. it was so hot that they had to put about 12 inches of cooling fans on top of it to cool the processor,” said ellison. “it was just madness to continue that project.”

LDOM 2.0 and next Solaris update

It looks like LDOM 2.0 support will be included in the next Solaris update, update 9 probably planed for release around september. This will in practice mean that it will finally support dynamic reconfiguration of memory. It will also include cooperative domain migration support, which is a foundation for live migration, which at least early this year was scheduled for LDOM 2.1. This will be built on the next LDOM firmware, 7.2.10.

LDOM 2.0 will also support the next Niagara chip, the UltraSPARC T3 with 16 cores. When put together with the announcement that the LDOM team is hiring it sure looks like Oracle is investing in SPARC and LDOM technology.

Solaris Virtualization for Voice of Customer Tour (PDF)
FWARC/2009/452 HV APIs for cooperative guest migration

Solaris 10 and "upgrade on attach"

The next update of Solaris 10, probably due this fall, will include support for the new option for the update on attach function for zones discussed earlier. All packages that where to be installed in a new zone can be updated at attach instead of the bare minimum to get a supported zone running. The option of doing this today is to include all zones in the initial upgrade, this can take a very long time with many zones, even with the recent enhancements to the packaging system in Solaris 10 10/09. Using this feature the global zone can first be upgraded and then the zones can be attached one after another, possibly moved from another global zone to minimize the downtime.

Read my previous posts regarding the other updates to update 9, or Solaris 10 9/10 which is the planned name and release for the update. In short, large ZFS update, JDK 1.6, iSER and Firefox/Thundebird updates.

Solaris 10 9/10 and second ZFS refresh
First hints of Solaris 10 update 9
Desktop update for Solaris 10 update 9

Solaris 10 9/10 and second ZFS refresh

It looks like the currently planned name for the next update of Solaris 10 will be Solaris 10 9/10, which gives us a good indication on when the new masters of Solaris plan to release the update. A release in September would make it the longest interval between updates since update 1, which was released around a year after the original Solaris 10 release. This longer release cycle is probably only for the better, one update per year is probably more than enough for most larger deployments.

Java version 1.6 will be added to this release and it will be the default JDK for new installations.

There have also been a second refresh of the ZFS code for this update, it's now something similar to ZFS in b132 but with deduplication disabled. This will bring features such as zpool split and zpool recover Solaris 10. Bug fixes and performance enhancements will of course also be included, such as 6869229, read more here about how this fix drastically enhanced OLTP performance for fishworks. Could we please have dynamic LUN expansion backported also?

These changes are in addition to the ones I've already mentioned my earlier posts:
First hints on Solaris 10 upate 9
Desktop updates for Solaris 10 update 9

Desktop updates for Solaris 10 update 9

Besides the more server oriented features which i've mentioned earlier there are a few desktop enhancement also coming with the next update of Solaris 10.

Both Firefox and Thunderbird will be updated to the latest, or close to latest releases. Firefox will be of the 3.5.x branch and Thunderbird of the 3.0.x branch. The bundled StarOffice 8 is replaced with an OpenOffice launcher that if not installed explains this and points the user in the OpenOffice direction.

LSARC/2009/446 Firefox 3.5.x on S10
LSARC/2009/085 Thunderbird 3.0.x
LSARC/2010/070 Thunderbird 3.0.1 on S10
LSARC/2010/017 EOF Bundled StarOffice 8
LSARC/2010/018 Mechanism for facilitating the installation of OpenOffice.org on Solaris

Solaris Samba update

I looks like both OpenSolaris and the next update of Solaris 10 will be getting a updated version of Samba.
This is probably most interesting for Solaris 10 since OpenSolaris has it's own native implementation of CIFS in the kernel. This update is needed for comparability with Windows 7 which requires version 3.4 of Samba.

Some details from the PSARC:
"Samba is the only available CIFS volume and printing server in Solaris 10 and 9 (production releases of the Solaris).

Samba is the only available CIFS printing server in Solaris 9 and above.

Besides Apache, Samba is the most important component in Solaris in the case of the business deployment. It plays primary role in interoperability with the MS Windows on Solaris 10 and 9.

Samba.org community discontinued support of the Samba 3.0.x currently bundled with all releases of Solaris."

Update Samba to release 3.4 [PSARC/2009/682]
CR 6852659, Update samba to 3.3.5 or later

First hints on Solaris 10 update 9

I come across some hints on changes in the the next Solaris 10 update probably scheduled around April, [45]/10? It looks like the zpool will be lifted to version 19 which would mean the following new high level features:

17 Triple-parity RAID-Z
18 Snapshot user holds
19 Log device removal

This would mean there would be no zpool deduplication in the next Solars 10 release, but that is not much of a surprise given that it was just recently integrated into ON. Triple-parity raidz and log device removal will nevertheless be a good addition while keeping the risk low.

It also looks like a iSER (iSCSI Extensions for Remote DMA) backport are in the works for this release.

Two additional 10G NIC drivers have mentioned update 9 integration in their respective PSARC:
Emulex PCIe converged NIC driver [PSARC/2009/526]
qlge - QLogic PCIe converged NIC driver [PSARC/2009/525]

Update:
Samba update to 3.4 also looks like it's aiming for this release together with iSCSI boot and Firefox 3.5.

Update2: The name for this release and additional features of ZFS is mentioned in a later post here.