This post is the first of three posts in which we will show you how to setup a fresh installed Sun Fire T1000 Server as a Solaris container server and deploy the Sun Grid Engine 6.2u4 software on different, securified, isolated zones.

Architecture

We are using a T1000 with on 1 Chip MultiThread processor with 6 cores and 8 GB of RAM. This system can be accessed throught a ILOM interface so we can physically reboot the server and work from the OpenBoot Environment. Also, we have attached a disk for the storage of the grid software, configurations and queues.

We want to provide a securized environment so we are going to set up several partitions using Solaris Resource Manager, and the Fair Share Scheduler to balance the load of the workload. All this settings will allow us to setup 4 non-global zones to run the grid: global as master, and the rest will be execution hosts.

Hardening the system

This first post today will talk about the tasks you need to do to create a hardened solaris installation by runing the Solaris Security Toolkit (or usually known as Jumpstart Architecture and Security Scripts, JASS).

First of all you need to install the software. Go to http://www.sun.com/software/security/jass/ and download it for free.

You will get a file called SUNWjass-4.2.0.pkg.tar.Z. Uncompress it with zcat and tar and install it as a standar Solaris package.

# zcat SUNWjass-4.2.0.pkg.tar.Z | tar xf -
# pkgadd -d . SUNWjass-4.2.0

Now apply the default secure driver to harden the system and free resources for our grid.

# /opt/SUNWjass/bin/jass-execute -d server-secure.driver

Reboot the system after hardening the operating system and login again using the serial console.

You will be forced to establish a new password for root, and you will see that your default root’s home directory has change to /root.

Creating Solaris Containers

Ok. Now let’s begin with the partitioning. This tasks is usually done by hand, but recently we have found a product from Sun called “Consolidation Tool for Sun Fire Servers V1.0” that allows you to setup an environment partitioned with Solaris Containers and Resource Management. Using this tool you can deploy faster a set of non-global zones with some cpu and projects created for the application you pretend to run on the container.

Let’s see this application.

Go to http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/consolidation_tool/index.jsp and download the full distribution software. You will get a file called consol_tool_v1.0.1_fulldist.tar.gz. Uncompress and untar it wherever you want, as this software will run using tcl and will generate a script with all the commands you are going to launch in the Sun Fire T1000 server.

Launch the application within the extracted directory, start_consolidation_tool.sh and wait for the gui to come up.

# cd /opt/consol_tool_v1.0.1_fulldist


# ./start-consolidation_tool.sh &

Here you have a video screencast (no audio) about how to setup a configuration with 4 containers with one core (4 vcpus) assigned and scheduled under Fair Share Scheduler.

Finally, you should upload the consolidation tool and the commands file in order to launch the execution. Take care of some bugs (features maybe) that prevents the pooladm command from working properly. You must create the file /etc/pooladm.conf manually. Create it using

# touch /etc/pooladm.conf

and repeat the uncompress of the consolidation tool package. Let’s use /opt as the standard target directory in Solaris for extra software, so execute:

# cd /opt
# gzip -dc consol_tool_v1.0.1_fulldist.tar.gz | tar xf -

# chmod +x Example-Deployment.sh
# ./Example_Deployment.sh

It’s an unattended script so the output is vast enough so we don’t capture the output this time. Just say it will create the pools and the non-global zones.

At the end the picture is:

1. Hardened Fresh Solaris installation
2. Enabled Resource Pool Management
3. Created Several pools for Containers0 to 3
4. Configured, Installed and running several non-global zones (sparse zones) named from Container0 to 3

In the next post, we will install and setup the software called Sun Grid Engine 6.2u4 that can be download from http://gridengine.sunsource.net/