Anything in Linux/BSD similar to Solaris 10 Containers?

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pac1085

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Jun 27, 2000
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Just wondering if there is anything avaliable that works similarly to Solaris containers.

I've been fooling around with 10 and really like the zones & resource mgmt.

Is there anything avaliable in linux or bsd that has similar functionality?


thanks
 
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drag

Elite Member
Jul 4, 2002
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I don't think that there is anything directly feature to feature equivelent.

But there are numerious ways to do virtualization on Linux and bsd. It just depends on what you want to accomplish.
 
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n0cmonkey

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Jun 10, 2001
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xen is probably the best thing to happen to *nix since OpenSSH. Probably not what you're looking for though. ;)
 
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drag

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Jul 4, 2002
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Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
xen is probably the best thing to happen to *nix since OpenSSH. Probably not what you're looking for though. ;)
Click to expand...

goto love being able to migrate running operating systems between computers though. :)
 
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n0cmonkey

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Jun 10, 2001
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Originally posted by: drag
Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
xen is probably the best thing to happen to *nix since OpenSSH. Probably not what you're looking for though. ;)
Click to expand...

goto love being able to migrate running operating systems between computers though. :)
Click to expand...

I haven't gotten the chance to mess with it yet, just keep seeing a lot of stuff about it. It's in my long term plan of things to do (along with AFS and kerberos :confused: ). :p
 
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drag

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Jul 4, 2002
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Ah, Xen should help out with your AFS/Kerberos stuff.

Just run your main system in Xen, with it in Ring0 or whatever.. so it can get special access to the hardware for sound and video and such... then build a couple minimal installs.. Like keep them under a few hundred megs or so, then you can simply copy the directory system while it is inactive. Mess around with that, when you want to undo the changes or try a different approach then you simply make another copy of your 'base' directory system. You could have your seperate KDC, a handfull of clients, and a openafs server all running on your desktop with very little impact on your main OS, as long as you have enough RAM and disk space. Gives you a good way to practice different setups and try failure/recovery mechanisms. All without ever having to reboot a machine or muck around with any ethernet cords.

:D
 
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pac1085

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Jun 27, 2000
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I'm going to be hosting 6 websites, 2 of them are high bandwith/traffic, 1 is going to be medium and the other 3 are single page sites.

I want them to all be independent of each other, and I want to allocate a certain amt of cpu/ram to each 'zone'. Easy in solaris, but I'd rather use linux or bsd.

It's going to be running a sunfire v240 server with a storedge 3320 scsi array attached.
 
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n0cmonkey

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Jun 10, 2001
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Originally posted by: drag
Ah, Xen should help out with your AFS/Kerberos stuff.

Just run your main system in Xen, with it in Ring0 or whatever.. so it can get special access to the hardware for sound and video and such... then build a couple minimal installs.. Like keep them under a few hundred megs or so, then you can simply copy the directory system while it is inactive. Mess around with that, when you want to undo the changes or try a different approach then you simply make another copy of your 'base' directory system. You could have your seperate KDC, a handfull of clients, and a openafs server all running on your desktop with very little impact on your main OS, as long as you have enough RAM and disk space. Gives you a good way to practice different setups and try failure/recovery mechanisms. All without ever having to reboot a machine or muck around with any ethernet cords.

:D
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I don't believe OpenBSD is supported, so I'll have to use a spare machine for it. All of those are in "storage" at the moment. :(

I need more for the machine I have in mind anyhow (dual p3 855 w/512MB ram).
 
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n0cmonkey

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Jun 10, 2001
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Originally posted by: pac1085
I'm going to be hosting 6 websites, 2 of them are high bandwith/traffic, 1 is going to be medium and the other 3 are single page sites.

I want them to all be independent of each other, and I want to allocate a certain amt of cpu/ram to each 'zone'. Easy in solaris, but I'd rather use linux or bsd.

It's going to be running a sunfire v240 server with a storedge 3320 scsi array attached.
Click to expand...

Except maybe for the CPU/RAM requirements, that shouldn't be tough to do on 1 system. ;)

The NetBSD guys are using Xen in production. I'd recommend NetBSD for something like this, as long as your hardware is supported. The last benchmarks I saw showed NetBSD being damned near (if not _the_) best.
 
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drag

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Jul 4, 2002
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Xen would probably work out for that. (Xen is a bit different.. it's like a hypervisor OS or a virtualization server.. runs closest to hardware and you can run solaris (eventually), linux, and FreeBSD (I beleive) on top of it.)

It would require you to have a seperate instance of Linux for each web server, but if you just keep everything minimal then that shouldn't be a big deal. Xen does allow for scedualling cpu time and giving different 'weight' to it's client OSes. Something like that. Also it will allow you to choose how much memory your willing to allocate to each 'domain'.

So in some ways it's very similar to Solaris containers.

I haven't had much of a chance to play around with it myself, but here are the user documentation for it.. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/readmes/user/user.html

Xen 3.0 should be out sometimes later this year.. it should add some finer grain control and soft limits for domains and such. Here is the roadmap. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/roadmap.html

I don't know about the performance overhead of Solaris containers vs Xen and like I said I haven't tried to do anything serious with it so I can't speak of personal experiances with it, unfortunately.
 
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drag

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Jul 4, 2002
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Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Originally posted by: pac1085
I'm going to be hosting 6 websites, 2 of them are high bandwith/traffic, 1 is going to be medium and the other 3 are single page sites.

I want them to all be independent of each other, and I want to allocate a certain amt of cpu/ram to each 'zone'. Easy in solaris, but I'd rather use linux or bsd.

It's going to be running a sunfire v240 server with a storedge 3320 scsi array attached.
Click to expand...

Except maybe for the CPU/RAM requirements, that shouldn't be tough to do on 1 system. ;)

The NetBSD guys are using Xen in production. I'd recommend NetBSD for something like this, as long as your hardware is supported. The last benchmarks I saw showed NetBSD being damned near (if not _the_) best.
Click to expand...

wow netbsd may be a very good idea. Especially for the smaller sites, I'd bet that it has very low overhead compared to even a minimal Linux install.
 
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pac1085

Diamond Member
Jun 27, 2000
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Thanks guys for the info, I really appreciate it.

Xen seems like it would do the trick, but right now it is only for X86.

They did mention a sparc port, so sometime down the road switching over could possibly work.
 
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drag

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Jul 4, 2002
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n0cmonkey

Elite Member
Jun 10, 2001
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Originally posted by: drag
doh.

I thought it was one of those opteron units, not a sparc machine. Ya, it's definately x86-only, so the containers may be the best.

Another alternative is to check out BSD Jails, which is kinda what Solaris containers were designed after. Another one is User-mode Linux. Don't think they offer the complete solution that Xen or Solaris does though.
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FreeBSD's still kinda new on anything but i386 and alpha, and from what I read Alpha support wasn't that great...

I had totally forgotten about FreeBSD's jail (Dragonfly has it too, but I think they're the only two).
 
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birdpup

Banned
May 7, 2005
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Originally posted by: pac1085
Just wondering if there is anything avaliable that works similarly to Solaris containers.

I've been fooling around with 10 and really like the zones & resource mgmt.

Is there anything avaliable in linux or bsd that has similar functionality?
Click to expand...
drag and n0cmonkey are the professionals here but the first thing I thought of were FreeBSD jails and I think this would work very well for you.

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