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ISP is a cut-throat business were Linux has home field advantage and if Solaris 10 can enlarge its presence in this sector it would be a great proof of its superiority over competitors. The Solaris Containers functionality comprises two main components, Zones partitioning technology and Resource Management tools. The Solaris Zones enables the administrator to create separate environments for running applications, while the Resource Management framework allows for the allocation, management, and accounting of system resources such as CPU and memory. Solaris Containers functionality is hardware independent and is available on any machine that supports the Solaris 10 OS.

There are only few ISP which provide Solaris zones-based hosting, the hosting that is definitly more upscale and more customizable that regular Linux hosting with shell account.  Among them

feed By: Jason Hoffman

Monday, February 26, 2007, 5:52:51 PM | Jason Hoffman

Our use of Solaris has yielded so many advantages that it would require a nice historical weblog post to cover them.

For the questions of capacity:

The fact is that people tend to not constantly use CPU, but do relatively need a lot of memory. So that means people are guaranteed a minimum that matches their RAM well.

Then they're allowed to burst up and use up to 16 CPUs in a given spot as long as no one else is using it.

So it's being given minimums that are "normal" in that you'd expect to be able to have that much CPU in a "normal" server and then the rest if governed by a fair share algorithm.

This when combined with being able to quickly scale horizontally and be load balanced by F5 BIG-IPs is powerful.

Thank you for the mention.

- Jason (Founder/CTO of Joyent)

virtualization.info TextDrive offers Solaris Containers hosting

TextDrive offers Solaris Containers hosting

Joyent is offering Solaris Zones hosting with storage for $1/GB/month and network transfer for $0.25/GB.

Monday, July 17, 2006 | 0 Comments

TextDrive seems to be the first company (advice if I'm wrong) to offer hosting on Sun OS partitioning technology: Solaris Containers (betterr known as Zones):

TextDrive's On-Demand Container Hosting combines premium quality Sun hardware with the performance of Open Solaris and the flexibility of zone containers. You get root access to your own Container, guaranteed system resources, a fully maintained operating system and packages highly optimized for the platform. ... We use Sun Fire servers with multiple AMD Opteron 285 (2.6 Ghz) dual core chips, and 4GB of RAM per core. The Opteron 285 is AMD's fastest dual core chip. Each server has network interfaces dedicated to public, private and storage interconnects (see here) and are attached to network switches dedicated to each of those functions. Each server has a series of mirror pairs of ZFS-based storage accessed over the network. This ensures that your data is always consistent and always available...
With ZFS availability it seems a very interesting offering. Check yourself here. Thanks to Hack the Planet for the news.

Why Don't More Hosting Companies Offer Solaris at Simon's Blog

It's frustrating. Imagine you want to buy some low-cost, dedicated servers (or virtualised servers). You will manage these servers, but they will be hosted in a remote data center. Now, you have a number of great choices if you want to use Linux or Windows as your server operating system; but what if you want to use Solaris? As far as I can see, in that case, you have almost no choice at all…

If you want to use Solaris, pretty much the only game in town for high-quality, reasonably priced Solaris hosting is Joyent's TextDrive service - specifically their Accelerator Hosting offerings. Joyent is doing some great things with Solaris and has put together some compelling infrastructure (as well as having the advantage of employing the mighty Ben Rockwood). However, to my mind there's a potential issue if you're doing anything that's at all CPU-intensive. And that issue is: you get only a fraction of CPU in your Accelerator (aka virtualised Solaris Zone). For $125 per month, you get a guaranteed 1/16 (one sixteenth) of a CPU (Update: see comments it seems this might actually be 1/16 of total CPU resources i.e. equivalent to 1/4 of a CPU core).

Now, I like Joyent's offering a lot - their infrastructure design is incredibly elegant (not to mention, state-of-the-art). There's no doubt about it, they're an impressive outfit. However, if you want a completely dedicated CPU at a good price, it would also be nice to be able to consider an offering like that of ServerBeach. ServerBeach has a great offering too. However, they take a different approach to Joyent - using commodity hardware and simple infrastructure.

The net result of that is: for the same price as an entry-level fractional CPU Solaris Accelerator Zone from Joyent, you could get a completely dedicated server with 100% of an Athlon XP2600 from ServerBeach. There's only one problem - ServerBeach doesn't offer Solaris. I'm not sure why - it's not like it would be either particularly difficult or expensive.

So, there we have it… Why don't more hosting companies offer Solaris?

UK based UNIX dedicated and shared hosting on Sun Solaris from Libadu

Alan Burlison's Blog Hosting a community website using Solaris and Tomcat

Outside of work I'm also a member of a Comminity-based Samba band, Meninos do Morumbi Oldham, along with my son James. Like most people in the IT business, once people figure out what you do you inevitably get requests to help with anything related to computers, and I got collared to set up a website for the group. I started looking around for hosting providers, and my original choice was bluehost.com, based on the recommendation of my colleague Phil. However, the membership management application I'm also developing is written in Java, which mean I really wanted to run Tomcat on the site as well, and bluehost didn't offer that option. Finding a hosting provider who would host Tomcat at a reasonable price proved incredibly difficult - the costs were way more than a non-profit like us could afford. Eventually I stumbled across mod3, a UK-based hosting provider who offer a Solaris 10 zone for the princely sum of £9.95 per year, plus pay-as-you-go for network bandwidth, disk space etc. The fact that they were running Solaris appealed to me, and I was happy to risk the £10 involved out of my own capacious pocket ;-) The base hosting package also came with 660Mb of usable disk space, which was plenty for our needs.

After purchasing the site domain name and hosting I started to think about what I wanted to put on the site. You get 64Mb of RSS memory with a base zone config, which meant I needed to be fairly careful with what I ran on the site. As I said, I knew I'd probably want use Tomcat at some point, so I began to wonder if I could run the whole thing with Tomcat alone. From previous experience of setting up similar websites before, I know that setting up the site is relatively easy, the real problem is providing content, then keeping it up-to-date and relevant. I also didn't want to become the bottleneck for making changes to she site, which pretty much meant that I needed to use some sort of Content Management System, so that I could give other members of the group the ability to edit content. Nearly everyone in the organisation is a non-IT type (one of the attractions of the group for me ;-), so whatever I used had to make editing easy - requiring that people hack on raw HTML was a non-starter.

As part of the day job I'm looking at the possibility of using a CMS for part of the OpenSolaris website, so I'd already been looking around at what was available (and free!). I didn't need an 'Enterprise level' CMS - features such as versioning, content staging, multilingual support or workflow management weren't necessary, what I needed was something easy for users to understand, and that didn't have huge resource requirements. And being written in Java was a bonus, as it meant I could then run it under the Tomcat instance I already knew I was going to need for the membership management stuff.

My final choice was MeshCMS, and I've been extremely happy with it. It hit all the key requirements that I had - simple to deploy (single WAR file, no database required), easy to customise, structures the site using the directory/subdirectory paradigm that any PC user is already familiar with, has an integrated WYSIWYG editor for editing content, and the clincher - has very modest resource requirements and fits inside my 64Mb RSS constraint. MeshCMS has been exceedingly well thought out - designing the look and feel of the site involves just modifying a single JSP template, which is then applied to all the pages. The site navigation menus are all automatically generated from the layout of the directory hierarchy used to store the page content, and most-frequently accessed pages bubble to the top of the menus. Linking to other pages in the site is easy - the integrated editor provides a dynamically-generated list of pages that you can select from. The editor even provides a list of the styles defined in the site stylesheet for you to select from - a feature that Roller (the package used to run blogs.sun.com) could well do with emulating.

Having decided on the CMS, the next task was to see if I could minimise Tomcat's footprint as far as possible. Tomcat runs as a normal Unix process, and so doesn't have permission to open low-numbered ports (below 1024), which is why by default it runs on port 8080. Webservers normally run on port 80, and using that port requires root privilege. The Apache webserver gets around this problem by starting up as root, opening port 80 then switching user to the webserver user before starting to serve pages. However Tomcat is written in Java, so Unix-centric mechanisms like switching user aren't an option. The normal way to get around this is to put Tomcat behind Apache, using the mod_jk module to shunt traffic between the two. However because of my memory constraints, I wanted to avoid using Apache if at all possible. There are a number of fairly vile hacks for doing this for Linux, including stuff such as firewall or userland port redirection, but most of them suffer from various problems.

However because I was running on Solaris, I had a far better option. I was already intending to run Tomcat as a SMF service, and one of the lesser-known features of SMF is that it is integrated with the Least Privilege mechanism in Solaris 10, which allows you to grant elevated privileges to normal user processes in a controlled way. This meant that allowing Tomcat to open port 80 simply required granting it the net_privaddr privilege:

    <method_credential user='meninos' group='staff'
      privileges='basic,net_privaddr' />

The really neat thing is that I didn't have to give the meninos user the net_privaddr privilege permanently, it only needs it for the duration of the service start method. The full service manifest is available here if you want to use it yourself.

So, if you are ever in the Greater Manchester area, check out our performances page on the website and if you get a chance, pop by and hear us play ;-) We were out busking in Manchester yesterday, and for once the weather was kind, despite the time of year :-)

Posted by alanbur ( Nov 27 2006, 10:54:59 AM GMT ) Permalink Comments [5]

Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/alanbur/entry/hosting_a_community_website_on

Comments:

Very cool. Do you get a memory allowance of 64M of application RSS + the memory taken up by the various OS components running in the zone (init, svc.startd, svc.configd, sshd, etc) or does everything running in the zone have to be under 64M to avoid additional charges? The smallest I've ever stripped a zone down to is about 25M or so of RSS.

Posted by William Hathaway on November 27, 2006 at 01:15 PM GMT #

Hi Alan. Did you consider GlassFish instead of Tomcat, or did you think it would exceed the 64MB limit? - eduard/o

Posted by 192.18.43.249 on November 27, 2006 at 01:49 PM GMT #

They are using rcapd to enforce the RSS limit, so the RSS of stuff that you aren't using tends to get paged out.

Posted by Alan Burlison on November 27, 2006 at 01:53 PM GMT #

Yes, I did consider Glassfish, but the starting recommendation is 256Mb of memory and 250Mb of disk for Glassfish, which made it a non-starter.

Posted by Alan Burlison on November 27, 2006 at 01:55 PM GMT #

You may (or may not!) be interested to know that Mod3 are sponsoring the UK Unix User Group Spring conference next week (20th & 21st March) in Manchester. I think they are doing something on Solaris Zones too

Posted by Mark Johnson on March 15, 2007 at 09:53 AM GMT #


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