OpenSolaris™ Bible

Chapter 21. Logical Domains (LDoms)

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Introduction to LDoms

• LDoms concepts

• Getting started

• Monitoring

• Virtual services

• Migration

Logical Domains (LDoms) are the hypervisor-based virtualization solution provided on the Chip Multi-Threading (CMT) versions of the SPARC hardware architecture. LDoms can be used to partition system resources into domains, each of which is an isolated environment that can run a standalone OS. This provides virtualization capabilities for SPARC similar to those described in the last chapter for the x86 architecture using the xVM hypervisor.

Introduction to LDoms

LDoms provide a type 1 hypervisor that is designed into the architecture of the SPARC microprocessor itself. The hypervisor is implemented as a firmware layer that supports running paravirtualized operating systems. It does not allow running fully virtualized operating systems. LDoms are supported on the CMT versions of the SPARC microprocessor, including the T1, T2, and T2 Plus processors, which support 32 or 64 threads per chip (the M-class SPARC machines do not support LDoms). This version of the SPARC architecture is reported as sun4v by the uname -m command. Earlier versions of SPARC processors, such as the common sun4u architecture, do not support LDoms. Because the hypervisor is part of the system firmware and is closely tied to the CMT version of SPARC, this chapter is more hardware specific than much of the rest of the material in this book.

Note

See Chapter 17 for background material ...