Data Center

DRIVING DATACENTER EFFICIENCY

THROUGH SERVER AND APPLICATION CONSOLIDATION
Virtualization for Sun SPARC Enterprise® M-Series Servers White Paper January 2009
Abstract
The massive expansion of compute infrastructure over the last few decades have left many organizations facing power and cooling, floor space, and administrative challenges. By embracing application and server consolidationstrategies, IT managers can gain real efficiencies that lower costs and streamline operations. Sun SPARC Enterprise® M-Series servers offer the scalability required to tackle consolidation projects. These systems also support a choice of virtualization technologies that help organizations match the right level of application and resource isolation to the job at hand.

Sun Microsystems, Inc.Table of Contents
Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Optimizing the Datacenter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Server consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Application consolidation . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Putting it all to work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Improving Datacenter Efficiency and Flexibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Dynamic Domains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Dynamic Reconfiguration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Capacity on Demand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Simplifying Application Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Solaris™Containers technology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Solaris Resource Manager software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Managing the Virtualized Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 eXtended system controller facility (XSCF) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . 33 Sun Management Center software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Solaris Management Console . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 SNMP service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

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Executive Summary

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Executive Summary
Business processes are increasingly dependent upon technology. After decades of expanding the ITinfrastructure, many organizations own a large, complex network of systems. Current challenges within these environments include datacenter floor space limits, excessive energy costs, and constraints on administrative resources. Given these conditions, many IT managers seek a more reasonable IT infrastructure strategy. Opportunities exist to gain efficiencies through application and server consolidation.Bringing together applications, databases, and services onto fewer, highly reliable servers can lower costs, increase efficiency, and reduce administration requirements. Sun SPARC Enterprise® M-Series servers offer the scalability that can maximize the return on consolidation efforts. In addition, these systems provide a range of virtualization technologies — at no additional cost — that can help...