Guest Domains Demonstration
Solaris Training Rapid Deployment of Logical Domains Part 3
>> Mick: As I mentioned, before we go on and create guest domains, we can do a list-devices and see what we got left.
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We also have to consider when we build a guest domain where we want to put the operating system. It could be on a separate physical disk. With ZFS, we could create what’s called an emulated volume which will look like a device. So grab a certain amount of space that create a device entry for it and then we can use that as the actual disk backend, which we’re going to do to rapidly deploy our domains a little bit later.
If we have UFS file system, we could use a mkfile command and create a fixed file and use that as the operating system backend. You could use SAN volume manager metadevices, although that’s probably a little bit unlikely. With ZFS technology, it sort of overtaken volume manager a little bit.
ZFS volume, emulated volumes are probably the best way to go. You can use Veritas. We could use any attached SAN, LUNs, iSCSI devices. If you’re lucky, you might have one of the new Oracle 7000 Series Unified Storage Solutions, which will provide massive amounts of storage for virtual machines at amazingly fast speeds with any product, all you can think of. Very, very easy to manage.
Those two things, something like T-series have and Unified Storage Solution would be an ideal match. In our case, we’re going to use ZFS emulated volume. If we look at a zpool command, we can see what the disk capacity we’ve got.
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On the control domain, I’ve got a mirrored arrangement. I’ve got 123 gigabytes for that.
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I’m doing a ZFS list so I can see the actual ZFS file system available.
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What we’re going to go about things is to create an emulated volume which basically grabs some of the space and makes it work as though it’s a physical disk, if you like, and then we can assign that emulated volume to the logical domain when we set it up. Then we can build the Logical Domain that Solaris thinks that is a real disk and we can build Solaris on it.
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One nice thing we can do when we’re creating an emulated volume is use a sparse option. We create a volume, let’s say a 500 gigabytes, even a 119 available gigs and it doesn’t actually use any space. It only ever uses the amount of space that is written to it. If in future months or years, the thing looks like it’s going to have flow the actual physical availability, using the zpool facility, we can add more disk devices to the flow without having to worry about all the underlying things that we’ve created like the emulated volumes and they will just naturally carry on growing as we patch, as we upgrade and so forth. So it’s a great way to go about things.
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Once we’ve created this operating system, we will probably patch it to make sure that it’s nicely up to date.
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The steps we would do, we’d create the guest domain on the aforementioned emulated volume, install the Solaris operating system within the new guest domain and then log into it and do a sys-unconfig.
Now here we’ve got the domain that’s already built, so I’ll just boot it up. While this is going on this might be a good opportunity to pass over a couple of questions.
>> Dave: Hi, Mick. Yeah. There’s a question in the queue and that is, what command is used to create a ZFS volume?
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>> Mick: That’s actually zfs create with -V option and very shortly, I’m going to actually show you how those done.
>> Dave: Great. Thanks. Another question that came in to the queue I can answer and that is, will the webcast be made available after this session?
Yes, it will. We’ll send you all a link to the recorded version of this webcast so that you can review it as often as you’d like and share it with your colleagues.
>> Mick: Thanks, Dave. If you all now look at the terminal window, you can see that I’ve got a login prompt. So my first Logical Domain that I’ve created and patched with the hostname seal is now booted nice and cleanly by the look of it. And when I log in it’s a standard Solaris build, I’ve patched it it’s conforms to a nice clean pattern.
Now what I’m going to do – just to show you it has a network identity, it has a time zone set, it has a hostname (sealed in this case). I’m going to take all that away now and do a sys-unconfig.
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Don’t do this at home, as they say. This will completely destroy all the identity of the machine. If you’re wondering exactly what it does, there’s a very good landing page if you do sys-unconfig. It lists exactly all the changes that it’s going to make. It will halt the machine.
>> Dave: I’d like to take this moment to remind everybody to keep their chat windows open. I’m putting some questions out there for the group. I’d like to know if anybody’s running Oracle database on Solaris. If so, what version of Solaris are you running? You can chat that back to us, that’d be great. Thanks.
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>> Mick: Okay. Here I’m now shutting down the initial Logical Domain. So there’s nothing special about the way I built it. It’s going to make a nice template to provision all the other domains that I’m going to create.
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The emulated volume that I created you can actually see here in this window. I’ve created a zfs file system or dataset, if you’d like, with the LDom files just to keep things nicely separated. Within that I did – this is in the notes very shortly – zfs create-V.
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I would’ve said – my pool name is rpool.
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I call the volume goldvol just to indicate that it’s the golden volume from which I create all the other volumes later on. Obviously, I’m not going to press “Enter” on that, but that would appear with absolutely zero space being occupied but appearing to be a 500 gigabyte emulated volume, the -s option being the sparse option.
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Now my Logical Domain has been sys-unconfig’d and it’s halted back to the OK prompt. So we’re sort of ready now to create the next cloned Logical Domain, which was the whole point of the webinar.
What I’m going to do shortly is take a snapshot. I went straightaway because I’m going to give you full details. I’m going to take a snapshot of that goldvol to preserve it and then I can take clones of the snapshot. The snapshot will remain completely [9:53 inaudible] in time, if you like, at that particular point. No changes will be made and I can in the future just clone as many copies of it as I need, each one thinking that it’s a 500 gig disk, but each one also are only using the actual space that it’s written to in the operating system. Sometimes that could be just a few megabytes so it’s very, very economical in terms of disk space.
Once I’ve cloned the disk that would be actually a writable volume and then I assign the clone to the next Logical Domain boot from it and then go through the configuration process, each clone being a basically a sys-unconfig operating system.
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