Moving and Migrating Non-Global Zones (Tasks)

This chapter is new for the Solaris 10 11/06 release. Additional features have been added in subsequent releases.

This chapter describes how to:

• Move an existing non-global zone to a new location on the same machine

• Validate what will happen in a non-global zone migration before the actual migration is performed.

• Migrate an existing non-global zone to a new machine

• Use the zoneadm detach and zoneadm attach commands to update a zone that has a lower patch level to the level of a global zone at a higher patch level.

Starting with the Solaris 10 10/08 release, if the new host has the same or later versions of the zone-dependent packages and associated patches, using zoneadm attach with the -u option updates the minimum set of packages to make the non-global zone usable on the new host. If the new host has a mixture of higher and lower version patches as compared to the source host, then an update during the attach operation is not allowed.

The zoneadm attach command used with the -u option also enables migration between machine classes, such as from sun4u to sun4v.

Starting with the Solaris 10 9/10 release, using zoneadm attach with the -U option updates all of the packages for the zone, so that these packages match what would be seen with a newly installed non-global zone on this host. Any packages installed inside the zone but not installed in the global zone are ignored and left as-is. This option also enables automatic migration between machine classes, such as from sun4u to sun4v.

As an alternative to normal patching, the zones can be detached while the global zone is patched, and then reattached with the -U option to match the patch level of the global zone.

For information on moving and migrating lx branded zones, see Chapter 37, Moving and Migrating lx Branded Zones (Tasks).