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Posts in Virtualization
Resource controls against fork bombs executed inside Solaris Zones
I came across this neat little tidbit on page 27 while reading through the pdf article *UNDERSTANDING THE SECURITY CAPABILITIES OF SOLARIS™ ZONES SOFTWARE As a test, I'm going to set this resource control on a zone and execute a fork bombto see what appears in system logs. This is pretty cool stuff! This parameter can be used, but should not be set so low that it impacts normal application operation. An accurate baseline for the number of LWPs for a given zone should be determined in order to set this valuable at an appropriate level…
$ read more →Viewing Solaris zone resource utilization
Solaris zones have been around for quite some time now, and provide low overhead execution environments for running application. Admins who need to understand how zones are utilizing CPU and memory resources typically turn to prstat, which provides the "-Z" option to view utilization by zone: While reviewing the Solaris zones mailing list last night, I noticed that Jeff Victor posted a link to a Perl script that can provide utilization data for zones. This script has a TON of potential, especially once it is able to report on network and disk utilization.
$ read more →Cleaning up failed package installations
While attempting to install a Sun package this week, I encountered the following error: After a bit of truss'ing, I noticed that the pkgadd commands were checking for the existence of files with the name .ai.pkg.zone.lock. in /tmp. Based on a cursory inspection of the package utility source code, it appears these files are used as lock files to prevent multiple package commands from running at the same time. Since this was the only package installation running on the system, I logged into the zone and removed the stale lock file: Once I removed this file, the package installed like a champ…
$ read more →Getting VMWare server installed on a Fedora Core 6 desktop
I came across two bizarre issues last week while installing VMWare server on a Fedora Core 6 desktop. The first issue occurred when the vmware-config.pl script attempted to build the vmmon kernel module: After a bit of poking around in /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only, I figured out that I didn't have the correct architecture of the redhat kernel source installed (my system had the i686 kernel development package instead of the i586 kernel development package). Once I removed the kernel-devel-i686 package and added the kernel-devel-i586 package, the kernel module built fine, but the vmnet module failed to build: After a bit of googling, it turns out that one of the headers is reliant on a deprecated configuration header. To fix this issue, I had to run vmware-config.pl again after touching config.h in the include directory of the kernel source that matched my running kernel (in this case, 2.6.18-1.2869.fc6-i586): Once I addressed these two issues, VMWare server ran perfectly!
$ read more →OpenVZ is being ported to the Sun niagra processor
I recently started playing around with OpenVZ, which is a lighweight virtualization engine for Linux. The OpenVZ developers must like what they see in the Sun niagra processor, since they are actively working to port OpenVZ to the niagra. This is great news, since OpenVZ has the most potential IMHO of all of the Linux vitualization technologies (e.g., Xen, KVM, etc.). Tis good stuff!
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