Do we have enough resources for Solaris global and two local zones ? - Beginner Question

[underh20]

Our Solaris 10 server has 16 cpus and 64Gb memory. It's running
Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle 5.0 mp3.

We are building 2 local zones, i.e., "admiralty" is for Oracle
database and "stanley" is for Websphere. Both zones are using Fair-
Share Scheduler. Zone admiralty has 6 capped cpus and 16 capped
memory. Zone stanley has 4 capped cpus and 48 capped memory.

There are 6 cpus left and no memory left for the global zone when
Oracle and Websphere are up and running. Is this going to be any
issue ? If it is, could anyone advise me the best way to properly
allocate and manage resources for these 3 zones.

We do have license restrictions on number of cpus for Oracle and
Websphere zones. Also, the Veritas file systems in global zone will
be shared and mounted in these 2 local zones.

Thanks, Bill

# zonecfg -z admiralty info

zonename: admiralty
zonepath: /export/zone/admiralty
brand: native
autoboot: true
bootargs:
pool: pool_admiralty
limitpriv:
scheduling-class: FSS
ip-type: shared
:
:
:
capped-cpu:
[ncpus: 6.00]
capped-memory:
physical: 16G
rctl:
name: zone.cpu-cap
value: (priv=privileged,limit=600,action=deny)

# zonecfg -z stanley info

zonename: stanley
zonepath: /export/zone/stanley
brand: native
autoboot: true
bootargs:
pool: pool_stanley
limitpriv:
scheduling-class: FSS
ip-type: shared
:
:
:
:
capped-cpu:
[ncpus: 4.00]
capped-memory:
physical: 48G
rctl:
name: zone.cpu-cap
value: (priv=privileged,limit=400,action=deny)

[nelson]

wow, websphere needs that much ram?

as an aside, isn't the FSS associated more with shares (zone.cpu-
shares resource) instead of hard caps?

[ITguy]

> There are 6 cpus left and no memory left for the global zone when
> Oracle and Websphere are up and running. Is this going to be any
> issue ? If it is, could anyone advise me the best way to properly
> allocate and manage resources for these 3 zones.

When the system runs out of RAM, it will use disk-based swap and
performance will deteriorate. You shouldn't reach that point though
until BOTH zones use ALL assigned memory. I've found that if your
apps are running in dedicated zones, the global zone has very little
CPU requirements, and as a general rule I usually reserve 1GB RAM for
the global zone.

> wow, websphere needs that much ram?

Depends on what you want websphere to do...

> as an aside, isn't the FSS associated more with shares (zone.cpu-
> shares resource) instead of hard caps?

In this case they are using hard caps for licensing. You do lose some
benefits of FSS this way though.

[Alexander J. Maidak]

For oracle I don't believe using the capped-cpu jive's with the license.
I think you need to use a pset/pool method or the "dedicated cpu" zonecfg
parameter to create a "hard" partition in the number of cpu's that the
container can see.

Are you positive you're using that much memory for webpshere, you must
hosting more then 2 dozen JVMs in that container.

What does prstat -mLZ from the global zone indicate for you're memory
utilization?