[OmniOS-discuss] Ang: add rootzpool for zones

[Eric Sproul]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 10:59 AM, Johan Kragsterman
<johan.kragsterman at capvert.se> wrote:
>  I suppose you guys have some influense there, about what's going to be
> included or not...?

Since Oracle's additions to Solaris 11 are not open-source, the only
way to implement this feature would be a completely separate
implementation; "from scratch", as it were.  If someone really wants
it, and they have the skill to pull it off, then maybe it will happen.
 Such is the way of open source. :)

>
>  So, if I do not have this feature, could I just install a zone on a
> dedicated zpool(like set zonepath=/zonepool1/zone1, where zonepool1 is a
> fibre channel LUN), detach it, and then try to attach it in another host?
>
>  I've allready done the first, installed it to a LUN, but not yet tried to
> move it.
>
>  If you can provide me with some directions here, I will do this in my SAN
> lab, and document it on the OmniOS wiki.

Zones are lightweight virtualization, so they have deeper dependencies
on the host system than do hardware-virtualized solutions.  This makes
them trickier to move between hosts, but with some discipline it can
be done.

The source and destination hosts must be running the same OS version.
This should both match both between the hosts and between the
destination host and the non-global zone being moved, but does not
have to.  An upgrade-on-attach procedure is used to compare the
attaching zone's packages with the host system, and will attempt to
synchronize them.

A quick summary of the procedure is that you shut down the zone on the
source system and detach it (zoneadm -z <zonename> detach).  You
relocate the zone's storage to the new host, which in your case is to
move the FC LUN.  Then you copy the zone configuration from the source
host to the destination host (zonecfg -z <zonename> export -f <file>,
then zonecfg -z <zonename> -f <file>).  At this point you have a
configured zone on the new host, and you attach with upgrade by doing
'zoneadm -z <zonename> attach -u'.  You'll see output on the attach
operation's progress and whether it succeeds or not.

>
> By the way, it is not much discussions about zones here, is it?

They tend to "just work".  :)

Eric