Once Upon a Time in the Kingdom of Serv

If you're the type of person who has no time to read fairy tales, scroll to the very bottom for a link to the article.

Once upon a time there was a very happy Kingdom called Serv. It was ruled by inventors called engineers. Most of the engineers were clever, kind, and handsome. They had beautiful wives who cooked them tasty and nutritious meals.

A few of the engineers, however, were lazy, dull, and had foul breath. Their wives had big, hairy, purple moles, and sat around all day watching reruns of Bridezilla. They served their husbands pork rinds and salami instead fresh fruit. And they hated sysadmins.

Sysadmins were the workers of the Kingdom. They were very playful, and they had big strong hands. They spent their days tossing servers back and forth to each other, or playing hacky sack.

The Kingdom was a happy place because the clever, kind, and handsome engineers had long ago invented a wonderful contraption called, as you would expect, a "server." Servers were loved throughout the Serv kingdom and all the surrounding kingdoms. They came in shiny metal boxes and had blinking lights. Best of all, they had straight edges so that sysadmins could toss them back and forth to each other. Sysadmins loved tossing servers back and forth to each other, and at lunch time it was not uncommon for several servers to be in the air at once. But when a sysadmin dropped a server, it usually broke. And when a server broke, it was called a "failure." And a failure always woke up The Boss.

The Boss was a hairy ugly giant with one eye. He did only two things. He slept. And he fired sysadmins for waking him up. Naturally, everybody preferred to keep the boss asleep. Especially sysadmins.

Polite people in the Kingdom never mentioned the word "failure" at dinner parties, not even in a whisper, lest they unwittingly awaken The Boss. But everybody knew that if sysadmins began to appear on their sofas in the middle of the night, somewhere in the Kingdom a failure had occurred.

The wives of the clever, kind, and handsome engineers begged their husbands to do something about the plight of the playful sysadmins. And so the clever, kind, and handsome engineers invented the cluster. A cluster was an enchanted cable that connected groups of servers in a magical way. When one server was dropped by a sysadmin, the cable moved that server's applications to another server so fast that nobody had time to even think of saying "failure," much less say it loud enough to wake The Boss. When the dropped server was fixed, the enchanted cable moved that server's applications back.

And so the Kingdom was full of happy sysadmins tossing servers back and forth during lunch, and sleeping in their very own beds at night.

This turn of events, of course, made the pork rind and Bridezilla wives jealous. During the commercials they screeched at their engineer husbands until they invented a curse to get the sysadmins fired again and back on the sofas of the beautiful wives who cooked their engineer husbands tasty and nutritious food.

It was an unspeakable curse, and polite people at dinner parties didn't dare to even whisper its name. When this curse was unleashed upon the Kingdom, all the beautiful metal servers disappeared. Except one. And inside that one server were trapped the spirits of all the other servers. The sysadmins stood around staring at it, wondering of what use their big strong hands were when the servers no longer had bodies.

One by one the sysadmins grew sad and left, and in no time at all, almost all the clever, kind, and handsome engineers had sysadmins sleeping on their sofas again.

The Kingdom was not a happy place.

Until one day, it occurred to the cleverest, kindest, and most handsome of the clever, kind, and handsome engineers to put a spell on the enchanted cable so that it could do the same thing for the spirit servers that it once did for the physical servers.

It was a wonderful invention, and the sysadmins jumped off their sofas to learn how to use it. But as you would expect, the wives of the lazy, dull, and foul-breathed engineers made their malodorous husbands put a curse on the new invention. As curses go, it was rather weak, and only managed to add a little confusion to the wonderful new invention. And so, today we are left with:

Two Ways to Create a Cluster from Logical Domains

Configure logical domains within Oracle Solaris Cluster
Configure Oracle Solaris Cluster within Oracle VM Server for SPARC

The first approach is fairly obvious. You can put one or more applications inside each domain and create a cluster from all the domains. When a particular domain goes down, the applications running inside it get moved to a working domain. The domains are controlled individually through Oracle VM Server for SPARC, and the cluster is controlled by S.

The second approach is more involved, but it provides significant benefits. It consists of setting up Oracle Solaris Cluster inside the control domain of Oracle VM Server for SPARC. When deployed this way, Oracle Solaris cluster can manage guest domains as "black boxes," which allows a site to isolate the administration of guest domains from each other.

Create guest domains
Live- and warm-migrate the guest domains
And manage individual applications like you can with the first approach

The second approach is well documented. In fact, Venkat Chennuru, a sysadmin with big strong hands who was elevated to the rank of clever, kind, and handsome engineer, took the trouble to write it down for us. You can find his article on OTN: