Jails

[pjc158]

I am very interested in where Jails is going in terms of a road map. At the moment the majority of the focus is on VM's for full blown operating systems. This is an overkill if all you are wanting to do is virtualise is an application. I am working on a project for the cloud where we want to virtualise possibly thousands of instances of an application.

Additionally we would like to live motion any Jail/container to another system to distribute loads or for maintenance. It seems only IBM has this feature in AIX. Can anybody help on the road map for Jails?

 

[da1]

If you're talking about HMC, I really doubt the FreeBSD jails will ever come close to it (although I would love to have all the power of HMC and LPARS, I doubt the FreeBSD jails will ever reach that far).

Some useful links:
FreeBSD Jails wiki
[url=http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/arch-handbook/jail.html]The Jail subsystem[/URL]

 

[Fred]

One thing you can do is to have your jails on shared storage (NFS for instance). With a little bit of scripting for adding / removing IP aliases on the hosts (if your jails are network servers), that would allow for fast, cold migration. Granted, that isn't live migration, but given the startup time of a jail with a single application, that might be fast enough for your purposes.