Solaris Zone’s Resource capping – MEMORY-CPU

Resource Management, Solaris 10, Zones

Solaris Zone’s Resource capping:  Resource capping is nothing but Limiting the system resources like CPU,Memory,SWAP  to local zone.For an example, if you are running local zones without a resource capping,there may be high possibility that one zone will consume all the global zone resources and it will effect other local zones which are running the same global zone.We do not want to put the system in such a situation. It’s better to put resource  capping on  each local zones to avoid such a situation. 

What are the system resource can be capped in Solaris local zones ?
1.Physical Memory & SWAP capping
2.CPU capping

The resource capping daemon(rcapd) is responsible for the resource capping .See the Man page of rcapd.

Assumptions: The below mentioned local  zones are running without any resource capping.

#zoneadm list -cv
  ID NAME               STATUS     PATH                              BRAND    IP
   0 global             running    /                                native   shared
   1 uarena11103        running    /export/zones/uarena11103        native   shared
   2 uarena11105        running    /export/zones/uarena11105        native   shared
   3 uarena11106        running    /export/zones/uarena11106        native   shared
   4 uarena11107        running    /export/zones/uarena11107        native   shared
   5 uarena11108        running    /export/zones/uarena11108        native   shared
   6 uarena11109        running    /export/zones/uarena11109        native   shared

Verifying the capping on all the zones,

# cd /etc/zones
# grep -i mem *
# grep -i cpu *

As per above output, no capping has been made on the local zones.

Memory Capping:
To perform the memory capping,Login to global zone and perform the below. Here i am setting capping for physical memory ,SWAP.

MYGLOBAL#
zonecfg -z uarena11105
zonecfg:uarena11105> add capped-memory
zonecfg:uarena11105:capped-memory> set physical=24G
zonecfg:uarena11105:capped-memory> set swap=10G
zonecfg:uarena11105:capped-memory> set locked=1G
zonecfg:uarena11105:capped-memory> end
zonecfg:uarena11105>commit
zonecfg:uarena11105>exit
MYGLOBAL#

As per the above settings,local zone uarena11105 can use up to 24GB of physical memory from global and it can utilize swap up to 10GB. Locked memory is nothing but a physical memory which is dedicated physical memory to that localzone. 

CPU capping:
As like the memory capping ,we can cap the CPU’s to local zone. CPU is a key resource for applications and its needs to be divided across the local zone according to the requirement.To perform the CPU capping,login to global zone and perform the below.
To determine the no of physical CPU’s in your global zone,use “psrinfo -pv” command.

MYGLOBAL#zonecfg -z uarena11105
zonecfg:uarena11105>
zonecfg:uarena11105>add capped-cpu
zonecfg:uarena11105>capped-cpu> set ncpus=16
zonecfg:uarena11105>capped-cpu> end
zonecfg:uarena11105> commit
zonecfg:uarena11105> exit
MYGLOBAL#

As per the above command uarena11105 zone can use up to 16 CPU’s.

For CPU resource ,we have an option to assign dedicated CPU’s to the local zones.By doing that global & other local zones can’t use the those dedicated CPU’s which we have assigned to the zone.Here we will see how to perform that.

MYGLOBAL#zonecfg -z uarena11105
zonecfg:uarena11105>
zonecfg:uarena11105>add dedicated-cpu
zonecfg:uarena11105>dedicated-cpu> set ncpus=16
zonecfg:uarena11105>dedicated-cpu> end
zonecfg:uarena11105> commit
zonecfg:uarena11105> exit
MYGLOBAL#

The above command will set 16 dedicated CPU’s to zone uarena11105.If you want you can set importance to specific CPU by set property “set importance=2” in dedicated-cpu field. 

You can verify the setting using below command.

MYGLOBAL#zonecfg -z uarena11105 info