About Migration and Compatible Configurations

A kernel zone's configuration must be completely compatible with the migration target host's environment, as if you were detaching then attaching the zone. A zone that boots on a new host after a warm or live migration is resuming from a saved memory state and is expecting a particular setup. Any incompatibilities cause migration to fail.

If you are migrating a kernel zone to another system that is identical, and all storage references use a storage URI that is accessible by both hosts, the migrated configuration should be compatible without changes.

If the zone storage is local, you cannot use the zoneadm migrate command. You can either remove local storage devices from the zone configuration if they are not needed for booting, or convert the storage to shared as described in How to Move a Zone To a Shared Storage Configuration in Creating and Using Oracle Solaris Zones and then use zoneadm migrate.

Alternatively, you can move the zone using a unified archive. See Using Unified Archives for System Recovery and Cloning in Oracle Solaris 11.4 for more information.

The following resources and properties must be the same in the zone configuration on the source and target hosts:

• Amount of memory specified for the capped-memory:physical value

• Value of the capped-memory:pagesize-policy property.

• Number of virtual CPUs specified for virtual-cpu:ncpus

• Shared storage URI and id for disk devices specified with the device resource

• Properties of virtual NICs specified with net or anet resources

If you configure the zone on the target host before migration, the target host's version of the zone configuration is used to boot the zone. If the configuration is incompatible with the current zone configuration, an error is returned. The encryption keys for the zone must also match. See Encryption Keys and Host Data.

If you do not configure the zone on the target host before migration, the zone configuration is exported from the source host and imported on the target host. The user performing the migration must have the Zone Configuration rights profile and solaris.zone.configuration authorization to create zone configurations on the target host. See Rights Required to Perform Kernel Zone Migrations for more information.

If the target host environment is not identical, observe the following guidelines:

• If the CPU of the system is different, you must set the cpu-arch to a migration class if you want to do warm or live migration. See Preparation for Migrating Kernel Zones to Systems With Different CPUs or OS Versions. You do not need to set this property for cold migration.

• If the source and target hosts are running different versions of Oracle Solaris on SPARC-based systems, you might need to set host-compatible property to specify which Oracle Solaris features can be supported on both hosts. See Preparation for Migrating Kernel Zones to Systems With Different CPUs or OS Versions. You do not need to set this property for cold migration.

• If the source host is running Oracle Solaris 11.4 and the target host is running Oracle Solaris 11.3 you must clear the pagesize-policy property. See About Memory Page Size Policy and Physical Memory.