Best Practices for Running Oracle Databases in Solaris Containers
By Roman Ivanov on Jan 23, 2009
“Best Practices for Running Oracle Databases in Solaris Containers” now available on Sun/BluePrints site. This document describes Solaris Containers features for using with Oracle databases. You will learn how to setup Container and assign resources to it (scheduler, CPU and memory capping). It tells you which privilege gives you ability to use Dynamic Intimate Shared Memory (DISM) with Oracle. You may find how to setup Container so it will have it's own IP stack. Mounting UFS and ZFS filesystems, devices in Containers and System V Resource Controls also covered.
Solaris Containers provide a very flexible and secure method of managing multiple applications on a single Solaris OS instance. Solaris Containers use Solaris Zones software partitioning technology to virtualize the operating system and provide isolated and secure runtime environments for applications. Solaris Resource Manager can be used to control resource usage, such as capping memory and CPU usage,helping to ensure workloads get required system resources. By utilizing Solaris containers, multiple applications, or even multiple instances of the same application, can securely coexist on a single system, providing potential server consolidation savings.
Oracle 9i R2 and 10g R2 databases have been certified to run in a Solaris container. This paper provides step-by-step directions for creating a non-global zone in a Solaris container that is appropriate for running a non-RAC Oracle database. In addition, it describes special considerations that apply when running an Oracle database within a Solaris container.