About Oracle Solaris Zones in This Release

The default zone brand in the Oracle Solaris 11 Express release is the ipkg brand, described in this guide and in the ipkg(5) man page.

The ipkg branded zone is supported on all sun4u, sun4v, and x86 architecture machines.

The ipkg branded zone uses the branded zones framework described in the brands(5) man page to run zones installed with the same software as is installed in the global zone. The system software must always be in sync with the global zone when using an ipkg brand. The system software packages within the zone are managed using the Image Packaging System (IPS). IPS is the packaging system on the Oracle Solaris 11 release, and zones have changed to utilize this model.

The following differences between ipkg zones and native zones on earlier releases should be noted:

• The ipkg brand is the default instead of the native brand, which is the default on Oracle Solaris 10 systems.

• ipkg branded zones are whole-root type only.

  The sparse root type of native zone available on Oracle Solaris 10 uses the SVR4 package management system, and IPS doesn't use this framework.

• Zones in this release have software management related functionality that is different from the Oracle Solaris 10 release in these areas:

  • IPS versus SVR4 packaging

  • Install, detach/attach, and "physical to virtual" (P2V) capability

• Currently, zones employ manual syncing. The zones do not automatically update when you pkg image-update the system. You must manually update the zones after rebooting to keep them in sync with the global zone. See Updating Non-Global Zones in the Oracle Solaris 11 Express Release for the workaround.

• Global zones are integrated with beadm and use boot environments.

• The non-global zone root is a ZFS dataset.

• You must be on the network to install a zone. See Oracle Solaris 11 Express Image Packaging System Guide for more information.

• Zone software is minimized to start. Any additional packages the zone requires must be added. See the solaris publisher for more information.

• To install additional software in the ipkg brand zone during initial installation, use the -e option to the zoneadm install command. See How to Install a Configured Zone for an example command line.

• To achieve a full rather than a minimized zone, you can install the approximately 9.5–gigabyte redistributable incorporation or the approximately 3–gigabyte slim_install incorporation by using the -e option. See How Zones Are Installed and How to Install a Configured Zone for more information.