Monitoring the performance of Oracle VM Server for SPARC and Oracle Solaris Zones

PATROL for Solaris monitors and manages resource pools, zones, and project statistics. 

Monitoring Zones

The zones allow you to create and run one or more isolated virtual environments on a single physical server running as completely independent systems. The product enables you to view configuration data for:

  • A non-global zone in a global zone
  • A Solaris non-global zone from within the non-global zone
  • Projects in a global or non-global zone
  • Global zone CPU consumption metrics for Solaris zones

These attributes help you monitor the state and resource utilization of global and non-global zones. 

State

This attribute displays the current state of the zone. The value assigned for each state for a zone on a Solaris 10 system is as follows:

  • 0 - Configured
  • 1- Installed
  • 2 - Ready
  • 3 - Running
  • 4 - Incomplete
  • 5 - Shutting Down
  • 6 - Down

At any given time, the monitored zone is in any one of these states. The value of the Zone State attribute is 3 (Running). The remaining values are displayed as per the status of the zone.

PhysicalCPUUtilization

This attribute displays the percentage CPU utilization. The percentage CPU utilization is calculated against the avilable CPU on server.

MemoryUtilization

This attribute  reports the percentage of memory used privately by the zone. The memory pages that are shared with the processes from other zones are excluded. It is reported as (private RSS of zone x 100) / (total system memory).

Monitoring Projects

Projects are a collection of tasks, and therefore processes. The KM enables you to monitor the projects in a global or a non-global zone. You can specify the resource constraints at the project level that get applied to all the member processes of the project, unless the constraints are overridden at the process level. You can apply a set of valid resource control properties to the projects defined inside the zones. They enable you to put a threshold on the collective resource use of a project. 

The product enables you to view data for:

  • Configuration of the defined projects
  • Various run-time statistics
  • CPU allocation and utilization by projects
  • Memory allocation and utilization by projects

The following attributes enable you to monitor state and resource utilization of projects

CPU utilization of project

This attribute displays the percentage CPU utilization by the project. The CPU utilization of a project is calculated by combining the percentage CPU utilization of all the member processes of the project. The CPU utilization reported by this attribute is the same as that reported by the prstat system command.

Total private RSS of project

This attribute reports the RSS that is private to the processes of the project. It does not include the memory pages that are shared among more than one process of other projects.

If there are memory pages that are shared by processes of different projects (memory pages used by shared libraries such as libc.so), they are not counted while computing the value of this attribute. If such shared pages are counted then they are counted in the RSS usage of each project. Thus, when the total RSS of all the projects is added, there is a possibility that the same pages are counted multiple times, for different projects, and the sum might exceed the total physical memory on the system. Hence, private RSS is a better measure of project-wise memory consumption than total RSS since it excludes shared memory pages andd reports the local contribution to the memory usage.

Monitoring Pools

The POOL monitor type enables you to view configuration data and CPU consumption metrics for resource pools. Solaris non-global zones have a dedicated CPU share from the resource pool. A non-global zone with a bound pool functions as an independent system, without having knowledge of other non-global zones. The global zone is the parent zone, which has knowledge of the non-global zones and administers resource allocation from the resource pools.

CPUUtilization

This attribute displays the percentage of pool utilization across all the processors in the pool, in addition to attributes assigned for pool utilization in user and system mode.

 

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