Today we finished a very interesting project. Integration of our premier enterprise platform into a carrier network on a new supported platform. We got the chance to deploy to a very smart platform indeed: Solaris zones.

 Solaris zones are a technology somewhere between BSD jails and virtualization like XEN or Vmware (even there are huge differences again but I won’t go into detail). Have you ever wanted to set up a nice powerful server, put a highly advanced operating system on it and then split it into little machines literally in minutes so different teams can install components without getting into each other’s way? Well – welcome to zones. After installation we made a backup schema for most components based on snapshots and then mirrored the system. It was a pure pleasure. In the future the customer can simply keep the host machines updated and the zones which inherit most of the files from its host system will be automatically patched to. You could say (slightly simplified;-)) that zones enable you to have one server from a maintenance view but the security and flexibility of a whole server farm where services are isolated from each other. And you can add physical servers at any time and move very busy zones over. “detach”, copy ,”attach” – as easy as that. REMWAVEs enterprise suite of products runs on Solaris 10 and is being testing on the upcoming 11 (Nevada) platform as well. A complete VoIP provider infrastructure which can (in theory) be deployed even on one physical server but already separated in zones which then can be moved to powerful servers once you grow. How does that sound for flexibility?

How much work is the setup of one of these virtual machines (zones)? It is very simple (this example leads to a working minimum configuration – really!):

1.zonecfg  -z zonename

2. create

3. set zonepath=/export/zones/zonename

4. set autoboot=true

5. add net

6. address=x10.0.0.1/24

7. set physical=bge3

7. end

8. verify

9. commit

10. exit

11. zoneadm –z zonename verify

12. zoneadm –z zonename install

Tataa…

And that’s it. Now you have basically a new server (your zone acts like a complete system) which can be used to run a SIP proxy or a web server, video proxy or whatever you assign it to do. It is a very intriguing technology and I am happy that we went that route in this case. There are many advantages about zones but it would be very redundant if I would write about it since there is a huge community around it already;-) More information about zones you can find at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zones/

 

Nikolai Manek