Solaris network virtualization and resource control is a set of features originally developed by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

as the

OpenSolaris OpenSolaris () is a discontinued open-source computer operating system for SPARC and x86 based systems, created by Sun Microsystems and based on Solaris. Its development began in the mid 2000s and ended in 2010. OpenSolaris was developed as ...

Crossbow umbrella project, providing an internal network virtualization and

quality of service Quality of service (QoS) is the description or measurement of the overall performance of a service, such as a telephony or computer network, or a cloud computing service, particularly the performance seen by the users of the network. To quantitat ...

framework within the Solaris Operating System. It also enables secure and efficient virtual network interfaces and zones, making it easier to manage network resources. Major features of the Crossbow project include: * Virtual NIC ( VNIC) pseudo-network interface technology * Exclusive IP zones * Bandwidth management and flow control on a per interface and per VNIC basis

Description

The Crossbow project software, combined with next generation network interfaces like xge and bge, enable network virtualization and resource control for a single system. By combining VNICs with features such a
exclusive IP zones
or the

Sun xVM Sun xVM was a product line from Sun Microsystems that addressed virtualization technology on x86 platforms. One component was discontinued before the Oracle acquisition of Sun; the remaining two continue under Oracle branding. History Sun origin ...

hypervisor, system administrators can run applications on separate

virtual machines In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

to improve performance and provide security. Resource management and flow control features provide

bandwidth management Bandwidth management is the process of measuring and controlling the communications (traffic, packets) on a network link, to avoid filling the link to capacity or overfilling the link,https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/BWro ...

and

for packet flows on separate virtual machines. You can allocate bandwidth amounts and manage data flows not only for the physical network interface but also for any containers configured on the interface. The Crossbow resource control features enable increased system efficiency and the ability to limit the amount of bandwidth consumed by a process or virtual machine.

Features of the Crossbow project

This section briefly describes the main features of the Crossbow network virtualization and resource control project. For further details on each feature, see the ''Oracle Solaris 11 Network Virtualization and Network Resource Management'' white paper.

VNIC

A ''VNIC'' is a pseudo network interface that is configured on top of a system's physical

network adapter A network interface controller (NIC, also known as a network interface card, network adapter, LAN adapter and physical network interface) is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network. Early network interface ...

, also called a network interface controller (NIC). A physical interface can have more than one VNIC. Each VNIC operates like and appears to the system as a physical NIC. The individual VNIC is assigned a media access control address (

MAC address A MAC address (short for medium access control address or media access control address) is a unique identifier assigned to a network interface controller (NIC) for use as a network address in communications within a network segment. This use i ...

), which can be configured to a value other than the default MAC address assigned to the physical NIC. You can use the resource control features of Crossbow to allocate separate bandwidths to the individual VNICs. Moreover, you can configure a virtual machine, such as an exclusive IP zone or xVM domain on top of a VNIC.

Virtual switch

When the first VNIC is created on a system, a ''virtual switch'' is also created above the physical interface. Though not directly accessible to the user, the virtual switch provides connectivity between all VNICs configured on the same physical interface, enabling the ''virtual network in a box'' scenario. The virtual switch forwards packets between the system's VNICs. Thus, packets from an internal VNIC source never have to pass to the external network to reach an internal network destination.

Exclusive IP zones

A
exclusive IP zone
is a separate instance of a full TCP/IP stack, which functions as
non-global zone
Each exclusive IP zone is built upon a physical network interface and has its own IP-related state. IP instances support DHCPv4 and IPv6 address autoconfiguration. An exclusive IP zone can have its own routing table and routing protocols separate from the global zone on a system. Moreover, a system administrator can run the ''ifconfig'' command within an exclusive IP instance to set up a logical interface within the exclusive IP zone.

Modifications to the TCP/IP MAC layer

In Solaris, the MAC layer is part of the larger

data link layer The data link layer, or layer 2, is the second layer of the seven-layer OSI model of computer networking. This layer is the protocol layer that transfers data between nodes on a network segment across the physical layer. The data link layer p ...

of the TCP/IP protocol stack. The Crossbow project modifies this layer with several new features, including the MAC client interface. This virtual entity is a kernel data structure that is not externally visible to the system administrator. However, the MAC client interface along with the VNIC driver provides the VNIC functionality in OpenSolaris. Additionally, Crossbow modifications to the MAC layer enable a system administrator to assign a different MAC address to each VNIC on a system.

Resource management and flow control

The Crossbow project features provide bandwidth management and flow control on a per VNIC basis. A system administrator can configure different bandwidth allocations to the various VNICs on a host through the new Crossbow-related command
dladm.1m
an
flowadm.1m
Traffic through each VNIC can be classified and separated into individual flows, based on port number, destination IP address, and other parameters. These features can be used to improve system efficiency and enable differentiated services for separate VNICs.

Observability features

Standard Solaris observability tools can be used to monitor the status of exclusive IP instances, VNICs, and virtual machines running on VNICs. For example, familiar tools such as ping and snoop can report status on the operations of a VNIC. Additionally, th
Netstat.1m
command has been extended for Crossbow to report statistics on packet flows defined with the flowadm command.

Feature and code availability

The exclusive IP zones feature was first introduced in the

Solaris Solaris is the Latin word for sun. It may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Sol ...

10 8/07 release. The first version of the Crossbow feature set was incorporated in

2009.06. The full Crossbow feature set became part of Solaris with the 2011 release of Solaris 11. Oracle discontinued the OpenSolaris download sites after its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, but source code for Crossbow can be downloaded from the sites of the derivatives of

illumos Illumos (stylized as "illumos") is a partly free and open-source Unix operating system. It has been developed since 2010 and is based on OpenSolaris, after the discontinuation of that product by Oracle. It comprises a kernel, device driver ...

(see ).

References

* Belgaied, Kais and Lu, Roamer
“Crossbow Hardware Resources Management and Virtualization”
* Droux, Nicolas
"Crossbow Network Virtualization Architecture"
* Rami, Rosen
Virtualization in OpenSolaris

System Administration Guide: Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Solaris Zones
* Rami, Rosen
Open Solaris lecture (slides in pdf)
* Moellenkamp, Joer

* Moellenkamp, Joer

External links

* The project page for OpenSolaris Crossbow, which includes technical specifications, documentation and latest news about the project.
dladm man pages
Links for the most current dladm man pages, which is one of the main tools used to manage virtual network resources. {{Solaris Internet Protocol based network software Sun Microsystems software