Migrating Non-Global Zones Between Machines On Solaris 10

Apologies for the length of this post. I couldn't find any reasonable way to make it any shorter - so I'm including a link to where Sun is officially keeping all their documentation on this subject, should you want to explore it beyond this post. You can acess that info here!

As I always say when working with Solaris 10 (or whatever the latest version of Solaris is) you should do a trial run of a zone migration before you actually move any zone from one machine to another. Make up a bogus zone (like "origzone") set up the basic attributes and use that before you risk your important data!

The move is fairly simple at a high level (I will avoid breaching the subject of Solaris' RBAC to keep this at least somewhat short!):

1. The zone is halted and detached from its current host.
2. The zone is packed up.
3. The zonepath is moved to the target host, where it's attached.

In order to migrate the zone, you have to meet a few pre-requisites:

1. The global zone on the target system has to be running the same Solaris release as the original host.

2. To ensure that the zone will run properly, the target system needs to have the same versions of required OS packages and patches as the original. Any other packages and packages can be different; for instance any third party products and their respective patches don't need to be the same. Any packages that are OS-related and/or zone-inheritable must be included!

3. The host and target systems have to be of the same machine architecture (easily verifiable using "uname -m").

Once that's all been cofirmed, we're off! Running "zoneadm detach" on the original host sets the zone up so it can be attached to the target system. Running "zoneadm attach" on the target system attaches the migrated zone and verifies that the new system can host it.

Now we'll walk step-by-step through migrating the non-global zone from the original machine to the target host. Again, this process must be run as root in the global zone in order to ensure that it works without error (not to mention at all ;)

1. Become the root user and halt the zone to be migrated ("origzone" in this procedure).

orighost.xyz.com# zoneadm -z origzone halt

2. Now detach the zone.

orighost.xyz.com# zoneadm -z my-zone detach

3. Move the zonepath for origzone to the new host.

You can do this any way you want, basically. Just cd into /export/zones, and tar up the contents of the origzone directory. Then move the tarred up zone file to the target server using whatever file transfer facility you prefer, so that you have /export/zones/origzone set up on your target host.

4. On the target host, configure the zone:

targethost.xyz.com# zonecfg -z origzone

You will get a message from Solaris letting you know that origzone doesn't exist on the target machine, and needs to be created. This is only partially true ;)

5. To create the zone origzone on the target host, run "zonecfg -a /export/zones/origzone" on the target host. Then do the following:

zonecfg:origzone> create -a /export/zones/origzone

6. Make any necessary modifications to the configuration. For instance, to borrow from the example on sun.com, the NIC on the target host may be different, or other devices may not be the same. To change the NIC:

zonecfg:origzone> select net physical=ce0
zonecfg:origzone:net> set physical=bge0
zonecfg:origzone:net> end

7. Now, commit the new configuration and exit.

zonecfg:origzone> commit
zonecfg:origzone> exit

8. Attach the zone on the target host using the included validation.

targethost.xyz.com# zoneadm -z origzone attach

Note that, at this point, you'll be warned if you didn't meet any of the pre-requisites regarding required-same packages and patches on the target host, as we mentioned above.

As an additonal end-note, you can force the attach operation without performing the validation if you're absolutely sure that everything is okay and the message is in error. Of course, if the message is correct, and you're not, forcing the attach may result in random and bizarre zone behaviour later on. It's not recommended (By Sun or by me :)

targetzone.xyz.com# zoneadm -z origzone attach -F

Hopefully now you've gotten your zone migrated, and can script out as much as possible, to make mass migrations as simple and expeditious as possible in the future!

, Mike

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