Consolidation and Resource Management

Resource management is one of the components of the Solaris 10 containers technology. It allows you to do the following:

• Allocate specific computer resources, such as CPU time and memory.

• Monitor how resource allocations are being used, and adjust the allocations when required.

• Generate more detailed accounting informationthe extended accounting feature of Solaris 10 provides this facility.

• A new resource capping daemon (rcapd) allows you to regulate how much physical memory is used by a project, by "capping" the overall amount that can be used. Remember that a project can be a number of processes or users, so it provides a useful control mechanism for a number of functions.

Consolidation

The resource management feature of Solaris containers is extremely useful when you want to consolidate a number of applications to run on a single server.

Consolidation has become more popular in recent years because it reduces the cost and complexity of having to manage numerous separate systems. You can consolidate applications onto fewer, larger, more scalable servers, and also segregate the workload to restrict the resources that each can use.

Previously, a number of applications would run on separate servers, with each application having full access to the system on which it is running. Using the resource management feature, multiple workloads can now be run on a single server, providing an isolated environment for each, so that one workload cannot affect the performance of another.

Resource pools can be utilized to group applications, or functions, together and control their resource usage globally, such as the maximum amount of CPU resource or memory. Additionally, the resource management feature can tailor the behavior of the Fair Share Scheduler (FSS) to give priority to specific applications. This is very useful if you need to allocate additional resources to a group of resources for a limited period of time. An example of this would be when a company runs end-of-month reports. Before resource management was introduced, this would have meant that a larger server would be needed to accommodate the resource requirement, even though it only would be used to its capacity once a month. Now the resources can be allocated according to priority, allowing the server to be more efficiently utilized.