I m not even sure if this is an issue but before I dig deeper I wanted to check if it really is one.
I have a Sun Solaris server running Solaris 10 with 2 non-global zones on it. Is there a problem with Disk I/O in non global zones. To be more specific, would a MySQL database in a non global zone be any worse than one in a global zone if the I/O on the machine is high anyway ( I m talking an average of 10-15 Megs/s)?
There is always a performance penalty associated with zones. Whether or not it impacts your application is a different question. It's not really possible to say that your disk performance will suffer on throughput or IOps without more information.
One benefit you may get from zones is the ability to prioritize and limit resources they use - you could, for example, guarantee that your DB always has a certain CPU and physical memory resources available, regardless of what is going on in other zones.
It is possible to attach raw devices to a zone, which would minimize any I/O overhead of the zones, but generally speaking you'd want a pretty good reason for such a configuration.
The very same kernel is handling the zones I/O whether they are global or non global and there are no interposition libraries for native zones. I doubt there would be any measurable overhead in your case.
