[tech] Re: [ucc-announce] Re: Donations for manbo upgrade

[David Luyer]

> As a side issue, is there a good reason not to move to Solaris 10
> rather than staying with 9? Solaris 10 is trying to go for more
> linux affinity (binary and library support), and seems to have slightly
> less sucky virtualization[0]
> 
> . D
> 
> [0] Not that that is going to be that crash hot, but I wanted to see if
> I could get UML running on it. Strange urge to use spare CPU cycles
> going to waste when it's heating the room. Might run PVM or Seti at Home on
> it...

Solaris 10 has extremely cool virtual machines - known as 'zones'.

We use them extensively.  They rock.  :-)

Replace two dozen servers with a a dozen zones each on two servers
(for redundancy), save on FC ports to the SAN switches, save on admin
time for patches and all that stuff.  And you can pretty easily put
16GB-32GB in a Sun and let it run all your non-CPU-intensive systems on
one server.

However this is a 'super chroot' - separate virtual interfaces,
filesystems, process ID space, etc, etc, and admin tools to look
after services and packages on all the zones (typically you share
/usr but not /opt, so anything installed in /usr will be available
on all zones but disabled except where you enable it) - but is
not something that lets you run other operating systems.

David.