Zone Clusters: A virtual cluster based upon solaris containers

Virtualization is a powerful technology used primarily for consolidating applications that must be isolated on the same hardware. There are multiple forms of virtualization including both Operating System Virtualization and Virtual Machines. This paper introduces the Zone Cluster, which is a virtual cluster that uses operating system virtualization. Each Zone Cluster node is an operating system virtualization environment on a separate machine, which can be a virtual machine or a physical machine. The paper explains the benefits of Zone Clusters and describes how Zone Clusters were implemented. The paper explores the performance implications of virtualization by reporting file system, network, and application benchmark results for a cluster with no virtualization, zone cluster on physical machines, a cluster on virtual machines, and a zone cluster on virtual machines.