Sparc & Solaris virtualization

Sparc and Solaris has many virtualization components. Best usage is achieved when using some methods together.
Below we will discuss and advise a methodology when using Sparc and Solaris features to create and effective virtual environment. Virtualization environments have many concerns like isolation, sharing or dedicating etc. You can find Oracle solutions for any need and combine them together to get a well-designed architecture. Below architecture is just an example for combining technics and it is just and advised method, but you can create many different architectures as you wish, tools give you this opportunity.

If you have M-series server, you have the option called PDOMs (Physical Domains). PDOMs provide you isolation at board level. You can create PDOMs in a multi-national company like below :

PDOM 0 - Turkey
PDOM 1 - Greece
PDOM 2 - Germany
PDOM 3 - Russia

Inside each PDOM, you can create LDOMs ( Logical Domains ) like below. LDOMs are now called OVM for SPARC.
LDOMs also provide isolation at PCI-bus level but in our below design we will use it as a resource pool .We mean all needed resources here ( CPU and Memory and IO and network ) You can change LDOM resources on-line when needed.
LDOMs also have live migration usage if needed. We separate PROD and TEST environments below. You can use SR-IOV or make pci-bus assignments for performance at your PROD environments but using those technics prevent Live Migration. You can use virtualized IO at your TEST environments. Virtualized IO has no problem with Live Migration.

LDOM 1 - Primary Control Domain & Service Domain (service for both network and disk)
LDOM 2 - Alternate Service Domain ( service for both network and disk )

LDOM 3 - PROD Oracle 11g Databases Pool
LDOM 4 - PROD Oracle 12c Databases Pool
LDOM 5 - PROD Weblogic Servers Pool
LDOM 6 - PROD 3rd Party App Servers Pool

LDOM 7 - TEST Oracle 11g Databases Pool
LDOM 8 - TEST Oracle 12c Databases Pool
LDOM 9 - TEST Weblogic Servers Pool
LDOM 10 - TEST 3rd Party App Servers Pool

Inside each LDOM, you can use ZONES. ZONES will be your operating system for your applications. Zones have 2 types. They are Native Zones and Kernel Zones.

We advise using Native zones for maximum sharing and virtualization. Think that you will give Oracle 11g database to your Customer. You can provide many different 11g databases with zones inside LDOM 3. All will share single OS and kernel of LDOM 3. It is desired because why using separate OS and separate kernel , all using resources. it seems like duplicate resource usage, those OS and Kernel resources can be shared, this will provide better utilization and provide you to create more virtual systems.But there may be situations if you want different OS and different kernel for each virtual system, if you need such concern, we advise using Kernel zones. For example, inside LDOM 6 and LDOM 10 you can install many different 3rd party applications. In this situation, you may prefer them all having separate OS and separate kernels because different applications may require different OS or kernel parameter settings, you wouldn’t want setting a parameter for app-1 effecting app-2 due to sharing OS and kernel.

You can also use Solaris PSET (processor set) feature if you want to assign different cpu pool sizes to your different 3rd party apps due to licensing requirements. You can create PSETs inside LDOM 6 and LDOM 10, and you can assign this PSETs to your kernel zones inside those LDOM, with pool property of zones. For example, you can have Fraud applications and HR applications as kernel zones inside LDOM 6 and you can set 2 different psets for 2 different application type and assign those cpu pools to your kernel zones. You can also use cpu resource management utilities (cpu-shares/ dedicated-cpu / capped-cpu) of zones

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