About the solaris10 Brand

The solaris10 branded zone, described in the solaris10(5) man page, is a complete runtime environment for Oracle Solaris 10 applications on SPARC and x86 machines running the Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 operating system or later released update. If you are running an Oracle Solaris 10 release earlier than Oracle Solaris 10 9/10, it is possible to use the earlier update release if you first install the kernel patch 142909-17 (SPARC) or 142910-17 (x86/x64), or later version, on the original system. You must install the patch before you create the archive that will be used to install the zone. It is the kernel patch of the release that is the prerequisite for migration to Oracle Solaris 10 Zones, not the full Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 or later release. The software download site for patches is My Oracle Support. Click on the "Patches & Updates" tab. On that site, you can view the download instructions and download the images. Contact your support provider for additional information regarding patches.

Non-global zones running within a single global zone instance are supported on all architectures that the Oracle Solaris 11.1 release has defined as supported platforms.

The brand includes the tools required to install an Oracle Solaris 10 system image into a non-global zone. You cannot install a solaris10 brand zone directly from Oracle Solaris 10 media. A physical-to-virtual (P2V) capability is used to directly migrate an existing system into a non-global zone on a target system. The zonep2vchk tool is used to generate information needed for the P2V process and to output a template zonecfg command file for use on the target system. The utility creates a zone that matches the source system's configuration. On a source Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 system, the utility /usr/sbin/zonep2vchk is included in the release. To use the utility on earlier versions of Oracle Solaris 10, download the unbundled package from Oracle Technology Network (OTN) at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris10/downloads.

The brand also supports the tools used to migrate an Oracle Solaris 10 native zone into a solaris10 brand non-global zone. The virtual-to-virtual (V2V) process for migrating an Oracle Solaris 10 native non-global zone into a solaris10 branded zone supports the same archive formats as P2V. See Chapter 31, (Optional) Migrating an Oracle Solaris 10 native Non-Global Zone Into an Oracle Solaris 10 Zone for more information.

Figure 29-1 Oracle Solaris 10 Containers Transition to Oracle Solaris 10 Zones