Zone Contents After Creation

This section applies to initial non-global zone construction, and not to the cloning of existing zones.

A zone is installed with the packages that are specified by the manifest passed to the zoneadm install -m command. If no manifest is provided, the zone_default.xml manifest uses pkg:/group/system/solaris-small-server.

A new zone has the default solaris configuration and logs, which are only modified by the system configuration profiles that are passed to the zoneadm install -s command, and the networking information specified in any zonecfg add net entries.

The system repository, the zone's configured publishers, and packages kept in sync with the global zone are discussed in Packages and Zones on an Oracle Solaris 11.4 System.

The files needed for the zone's root file system are installed by the system under the zone's root path.

A successfully installed zone is ready for booting and initial login.

Data from the following are not referenced or copied when a zone is installed:

• Non-installed packages

• Data on CDs and DVDs

• Network installation images

In addition, the following types of information that can be present in the global zone are not copied into a zone that is being installed:

• New or changed users in the /etc/passwd file

• New or changed groups in the /etc/group file

• Configurations for networking services such as DHCP address assignment

• Customizations for networking services such as sendmail

• Configurations for network services such as naming services

• New or changed crontab, printer, and mail files

• System log, message, and accounting files

• Audit logs

The resources that are specified in the configuration file are added when the zone state transitions from installed to ready. A unique zone ID is assigned by the system. File systems are mounted, network interfaces are set up, and devices are configured. Transitioning into the ready state prepares the virtual platform to begin running user processes.

In the ready state, the zsched and zoneadmd processes are started to manage the virtual platform.

• The zsched process is a system scheduling process similar to the sched process. It is used to track kernel resources associated with the zone.

• The zoneadmd process is the zones administration daemon.

A zone in the ready state does not have any user processes executing in the zone. At least one process must be executing in a zone for the zone to be in the running state. See the init(8) man page for more information.