Install agents on all solaris zones

[hammer]

I have a query on installing zabbix agents on all solaris zones as well as the global zone.

Presently in our configuration, we have 4 locations and in each location we have 20 solaris global zones running between 5 and 20 zones per host.

We decided to only install a zabbix agent on the global zone as memory/cpu/filesystem etc. can all be performed from there.

But there are needs where it would be very helpful to install agents on the zones as well.

Is this recommended?
What performance issue might I encounter if I have a zabbix agent running on the global zone and 20 non global zones which are actually 21 instances of the zabbix agent on one server.

[hammer]

Basically I'd like to know what potential performance hits I could encounter with 21 hosts running zabbix_agentd on one server. Your input would be much appreciated. I'm sure there is someone out there or some testing performed to check this type of scenario

[hammer]

Is there anyone who use solaris zones with zabbix that might be able to provide some kind of information as to the performance with multiple agents running on the same host?

[ramasik]

i use only one zone per server for now... - no problem with performance
problems with some Items... like network interfaces because in solaris 11 - inrfaces in zone called like net0:1 and net1:1 -- it's don't supported by zbx_agent

i don't know what to do with this issue...

[jacolza]

When using sub-interfaces in Solaris 10 or 11, i.e. net0:1 or bge0:1, the total interface stats have to be read from the parent interface, ie net0 or bge0. As the sub-interface is still part of the primary interface.

With regards to Solaris 11 one can use the exclusive interface in zones by creating a virtual interface, that will have the same characteristics as a physical interface.

Regarding zones and the zabbix-agents, we run an agent in each zone in a Solaris 10 environment. This have little to no impact on the servers overall performance.

[trikke]

Hi,

we're having zabbix_agents on all our Zones and do treat them equal to other hosts.
We've had one issue though. As I'm not a solaris specialist I hope my explanation is correct: Apparently u can configure how much of a cpu a particular Zone will be able to use. Now we have a Monitor monitoring a logfile, which is realy growing fast, therefor the Agent uses about 2-Percent of the CPU which means it might be 80-90% of the CPU dedicated to this zone!! So this Zone looks as if it's on full load!
I don't know but i suppose that you can configure your Zone-Architecture differently, so this will not be a issue!

Greets
Patrick