Using ZFS on an Oracle Solaris System With Zones Installed

The Oracle Solaris Zones feature in the Oracle Solaris operating system provides an isolated environment in which to run applications on your system. The following sections describe how to use ZFS on a system with Oracle Solaris zones:

• Adding ZFS File Systems to a Non-Global Zone.

• Delegating Datasets to a Non-Global Zone.

• Adding ZFS Volumes to a Non-Global Zone.

• Using ZFS Storage Pools Within a Zone.

• Managing ZFS Properties Within a Zone.

• Understanding the zoned Property.

Keep the following points in mind when associating ZFS datasets with zones:

• You can add a ZFS file system or a clone to a native zone with or without delegating administrative control.

• You can add a ZFS volume as a device to native zones.

• You cannot associate ZFS snapshots with zones at this time.

Note:

Oracle Solaris kernel zones use storage differently from native Oracle Solaris zones. For more information about storage use in kernel zones, see the Storage Access section of the solaris-kz(7) man page. For information about storage use on shared storage, see Chapter 13, Oracle Solaris Zones on Shared Storage in Creating and Using Oracle Solaris Zones.

Adding a ZFS filesystem by using an fs resource enables the native zone to share disk space with the global or kernel zone. However, the zone administrator cannot control properties or create new file systems in the underlying file system hierarchy. This operation is identical to adding any other type of file system to a zone. You should add a file system to a native zone only for the sole purpose of sharing common disk space.

You can also delegate ZFS datasets to a native zone, which would give the zone administrator complete control over the dataset and all its children. The zone administrator can create and destroy file systems or clones within that dataset, as well as modify properties of the datasets. The zone administrator cannot affect datasets that have not been added to the zone, including exceeding any top-level quotas set on the delegated dataset.

When both a source zonepath and a target zonepath reside on a ZFS file system and are in the same pool, the zoneadm clone command, not zfs clone, becomes the command for cloning zones. The zoneadm clone command creates a ZFS snapshot of the source zonepath and sets up the target zonepath. For more information, see Creating and Using Oracle Solaris Zones.