Understanding Solaris Zones and Solaris Live Upgrade

The Solaris Zones partitioning technology is used to virtualize operating system services and provide an isolated and secure environment for running applications. A non-global zone is a virtualized operating system environment created within a single instance of the Solaris OS, the global zone. When you create a non-global zone, you produce an application execution environment in which processes are isolated from the rest of the system.

Solaris Live Upgrade is a mechanism to copy the currently running system onto new slices. When non-global zones are installed, they can be copied to the inactive boot environment along with the global zone's file systems.

Figure 8–1 shows a non-global zone that is copied to the inactive boot environment along with the global zone's file system.

Figure 8–1 Creating a Boot Environment – Copying Non-Global Zones

• In this example of a system with a single disk, the root (/) file system is copied to c0t0d0s4. All non-global zones that are associated with the file system are also copied to s4. The /export file system and /swap volume are shared between the current boot environment, bootenv1, and the inactive boot environment, bootenv2. The lucreate command is the following:

  # lucreate -c bootenv1 -m /:/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s4:ufs -n bootenv2

• In this example of a system with two disks, the root (/) file system is copied to c0t1d0s0. All non-global zones that are associated with the file system are also copied to s0. The /export file system and /swap volume are shared between the current boot environment, bootenv1, and the inactive boot environment, bootenv2. The lucreate command is the following:

  # lucreate -c bootenv1 -m /:/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0:ufs -n bootenv2

Figure 8–2 shows that a non-global zone is copied to the inactive boot environment.

Figure 8–2 Creating a Boot Environment – Copying a Shared File System From a Non-Global Zone

• In this example of a system with a single disk, the root (/) file system is copied to c0t0d0s4. All non-global zones that are associated with the file system are also copied to s4. The non-global zone, zone1, has a separate file system that was created by the zonecfg add fs command. The zone path is /zone1/root/export. To prevent this file system from being shared by the inactive boot environment, the file system is placed on a separate slice, c0t0d0s6. The /export file system and /swap volume are shared between the current boot environment, bootenv1, and the inactive boot environment, bootenv2. The lucreate command is the following:

  # lucreate -c bootenv1 -m /:/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s4:ufs \ -m /export:/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s6:ufs:zone1 -n bootenv2

• In this example of a system with two disks, the root (/) file system is copied to c0t1d0s0. All non-global zones that are associated with the file system are also copied to s0. The non-global zone, zone1, has a separate file system that was created by the zonecfg add fs command. The zone path is /zone1/root/export. To prevent this file system from being shared by the inactive boot environment, the file system is placed on a separate slice, c0t1d0s4. The /export file system and /swap volume are shared between the current boot environment, bootenv1, and the inactive boot environment, bootenv2. The lucreate command is the following:

  # lucreate -c bootenv1 -m /:/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0:ufs \ -m /export:/dev/desk/c0t1d0s4:ufs:zone1 -n bootenv2