Virtualization provides benefits for development, testing, and storage. System virtualization allows isolating applications on virtual machines rather than physical servers, improving flexibility, efficiency and management. For developers, virtualization allows experimenting with different operating systems without installing them locally. Storage virtualization with ZFS provides easy cloning, snapshots and restores of file systems for backups, testing, and application deployment. It can simplify storage management and testing environments.

1. Virtualization for
Development
System and Storage Virtualization
Christopher Kampmeier
Principal Engineer
Sun Microsystems
1

2. Data Center Today
Server sprawl is hard
Single application
to manage
per server
Client
Energy costs
Data Center Management
Service
are draining the App App Mail Database Database
bottom line
Developer
Server Server Server
Application
NETWORK
OS
Server
Average server
utilization between Storage
5 to 15 %

3. Virtualize Everywhere!

4. System Virtualization
Trend to isolation
Trend to flexibility
Hard Partitions Virtual Machines OS Virtualization Resource Mgmt.
App
App Database Identity File Web Mail Calendar Database Web SunRay App
Server Database Server
Server Server Server Server Server Server Server
OS
Server
Multiple OS' Single OS
Logical Domains Solaris Containers
Dynamic Solaris Resource
Xen (Zones + SRM)
System Domains Manager (SRM)
VMware Solaris Containers
Microsoft Virtual Server for Linux Applications
Solaris Trusted Extensions

5. Virtual Machines
Allows different File Web Mail
Application
Server Server Server
“guest” OS
versions and
types
Some OS
overhead for
the Hypervisor
Available on Server
many platforms

6. Solaris Containers
Lightweight virtual
OS instances
(zones)
One physical OS
instance

7. Solaris Containers

8. Applicability of Containers
• Solaris 10 is your deployment OS
• One OS instance and patch level is sufficient
• You'll get:
> Easy to establish virtualized OS instances
> Cloning of zones based on ZFS
> High performance runtime environment

9. Developer Use Cases
• Desktop and deployment OS' are different
• Don't want to pollute desktop OS with development
and deployment configs
• Easy means to snapshot and restore OS image
state
• Sharing demo setups
• Evaluate software that is available in VM image
form
• Experiment with other OS' before installing natively

10. Developer Options
• VMware is most popular
> VMware Server is free, VMware Workstation is not
• Linux-based Options are Available
> Xen is available in some recent Linux distros
• Solaris-based Option is Emerging
> xVM (partly based on Xen) is available in OpenSolaris
> Project Indiana is delivering desktop-friendly OpenSolaris
distro

11. Testing Use Cases
• Want to avoid buying new systems to host
additional OS images and/or apps
• Need simpler means of capturing image of manually
assembled deployments
• Reduce time to deploy to test systems by
provisioning pre-built images to the network

12. Testing Considerations
• VM Image Management tools
> Sometimes extra cost even if base VM features are free
• Pre-production and Production Environments
> Are they virtualized?
> If not, be careful about compatibility
> Probably warrants some level of qualification

13. Testing Options
• Solaris Containers
> When using Solaris 10 and single OS instance suits your needs
• VMware
> Server and non-free ESX
• Linux-based Xen
• SPARC-based Logical Domains
> When you have heavy investment in CoolThreads servers
• Solaris-based xVM
> Including “Ops Center” management tools

14. Deployment and Infrastructure OS'
An Emerging Trend
Deployment OS
Integrated Stacks Runtime for the applications
●
Hardware Platform Independent
●
Deployment/Runtime OS
●
● Integrated Application Stack
Application
SAP Oracle
Infrastructure
Deployment OS
OS
Virtual Machine Run-time
●
Boot Services/Proxies
●
● Virtual SAN Gateway
● Platform Specific Code/Drivers
Infrastructure
● Virtual Networking
OS
● Security (Packet Filtering, etc...)
● Fault & Power Management Inf.
Hypervisor
● Resource Management
● Management CLI + APIs
Hardware

15. Emergence of Appliances
Software
Appliance
ISV Integrated and Tested Stacks
●
● Contains Deployment/Runtime OS
Software
● Service-oriented black boxes
Appliance
Oracle MediaWiki
Deployment OS
Fully
Integrated
Virtualization Virtualization
Server Hardware
Appliance Appliance
Hardware Appliance for Virtualization
●
Runtime for Software Appliances
●
● Turn-key Virtualization Server

16. Storage Virtualization with ZFS
Immense Data
End-to End Software
Capacity
Data Integrity Developer
With check- The world's
summing and first 128-bit
copy-on-write file system
transactions
Huge Performance
Easier
Administration Gains
A pooled Especially
storage model – architected
no volume for speed
manager

17. ZFS Storage Pools
• Create a mirrored pool named “tank”
# zpool create tank mirror c0t0d0 c1t0d0
• Create home directory filesystem, mounted at /export/home
# zfs create tank/home
# zfs set mountpoint=/export/home tank/home
• Create home directories for several users
Note: automatically mounted at /export/home/{ahrens,bonwick,billm} thanks to inheritance
# zfs create tank/home/ahrens
# zfs create tank/home/bonwick
# zfs create tank/home/billm
• Add more space to the pool
# zpool add tank mirror c2t0d0 c3t0d0

18. ZFS Snapshots
• Read-only point-in-time copy of a filesystem
– Instantaneous creation, unlimited number
– No additional space used – blocks copied only when they change
– Accessible through .zfs/snapshot in root of each filesystem
– Allows users to recover files without sysadmin intervention
• Take a snapshot of Mark's home directory
# zfs snapshot tank/home/marks@tuesday
• Roll back to a previous snapshot
# zfs rollback tank/home/perrin@monday
• Take a look at Wednesday's version of foo.c
$ cat ~maybee/.zfs/snapshot/wednesday/foo.c

19. ZFS Cloning
• Writable copy of a snapshot
– Instantaneous creation, unlimited number
– Ideal for storing many private copies of mostly-shared data
– Software installations
– Workspaces
– Diskless clients
• Create a clone of your OpenSolaris source code
# zfs clone tank/solaris@monday tank/ws/lori/fix

20. ZFS Backup and Restore
• Powered by snapshots
– Full backup: any snapshot
– Incremental backup: any snapshot delta
– Very fast – cost proportional to data changed
• So efficient it can drive remote replication
• Generate a full backup
# zfs send tank/fs@A >/backup/A
• Generate an incremental backup
# zfs send -i tank/fs@A tank/fs@B >/backup/B-A
• Remote replication: send incremental once per minute
# zfs send -i tank/fs@11:31 tank/fs@11:32 |
ssh host zfs receive -d /tank/fs

21. ZFS and Application Deployment
• Consider deferring snapshotting and backup tasks
to ZFS
• Simplify your application file management story
• e.g. RDBMS server
typically store content on filesystems
>
greatly simplified means of backing up data
>
use ZFS snapshot and restore features to house DB files
>
momentarily quiesce DB, clone or snapshot and continue
>
even gives you an off-line copy against which another
>
DB instance can run to service “off-line” queries

22. ZFS and Testing
• Underlying Storage Management
> Is managing disk volumes a major pain?
> Would you like to move away from volume managers?
• Application Testing
> Consider any filesystem-based resource that you're
currently managing
> Is there value in snapshotting states of those resources?
> e.g. Run series of tests and quickly revert back to known
state – short of reinstalling environment

23. Summary
• System virtualization is being applied beyond
datacenter consolidation
> Gives you a new tool to take new perspective on existing problems
• Developer desktop virtualization can make you
more efficient
• Server virtualization can:
> Make test environments more flexible and efficient
> Provide opportunity for developers to deliver images for deployment
• Storage virtualization with ZFS can:
> Provide radically simpler means of approaching application data
management
> Ease day-to-day management of test systems

24. christopher.kampmeier@sun.com
Sun Microsystems