A zone migration transfers an existing zone or global zone into a zone on another system. The three types of zone migrations are live migration, warm migration, and cold migration.
All kernel zone migrations require the zone to use shared storage that can be accessed by the source host and the target host.
For warm and live migration of kernel zones, the zone configuration must be compatible for use on both source and target hosts. Requirements and information about configuration compatibility are described in Chapter 8, Migrating an Oracle Solaris Zone in Creating and Using Oracle Solaris Zones.
Native zones can only perform a cold migration.
In a kernel zone live migration, the memory state of the migrated zone is copied to the destination host while the zone is running. Live zone migration has a brief outage time that is not noticeable to most applications or end-users.
In a kernel zone warm migration, you first suspend the zone and the zone memory state is written to disk. During migration, the zone is moved from the source host to the destination host where you resume it after migration is complete by booting it in the usual way.
See Chapter 5, Migrating an Oracle Solaris Kernel Zone in Creating and Using Oracle Solaris Kernel Zones for information about live and warm migration requirements, preparing compatible zone configurations for migration, and how to determine which migration type is appropriate for the application.
See Using Live Migration to Migrate a Kernel Zone in Creating and Using Oracle Solaris Kernel Zones for live migration procedures.
For more information, see Using Warm Migration to Migrate a Kernel Zone in Creating and Using Oracle Solaris Kernel Zones for warm migration procedures.
All zone brands support cold migration.
In a cold migration, a zone is shut down on the source host and rebooted on a target host. Use cold migration for applications that provide time-critical services or applications that have a large memory footprint. Cold migration is recommended for transferring existing zones or systems.
See Using Cold Migration to Migrate a Kernel Zone in Creating and Using Oracle Solaris Kernel Zones and Using Cold Migration to Migrate a solaris Zone in Creating and Using Oracle Solaris Zones for more information.