1. Creating and Using Oracle Solaris Zones
  2. About Non-Global Zone Administration
  3. Migration and Transformation of Non-Global Zones
  4. About Zone Transformations

About Zone Transformations

Zone transformation or zone conversion is the process of creating an archive of an Oracle Solaris global zone or non-global zone and deploying it.

You can perform the following types of zone transformations:

  • Global zone to non-global zone. Called a physical to virtual or P2V conversion.

  • Non-global zone to global zone. Called a virtual to physical conversion.

  • Non-global zone to non-global zone. Called a virtual to virtual or V2V conversion. This transformation is useful for migrating a zone that is not using shared storage and thus cannot be migrated by using the zoneadm migrate command.

Oracle Solaris supports several virtualization technologies. For example, both logical domains and zones are virtual Oracle Solaris instances. Transformation of a logical domain to a zone can be considered a V2V conversion. However, because a logical domain is running a global zone, it is also a global to non-global conversion, which is a P2V conversion. For this reason, the model of zone transformation on Oracle Solaris 11 is usually discussed in terms of global versus non-global, instead of physical versus virtual.

In the Oracle Solaris 11.4 release, you can use only Unified Archives to transform to and from zones. See Using Unified Archives for System Recovery and Cloning in Oracle Solaris 11.4 for more information about Unified Archives.

Zone transformations are implemented by archiving the Oracle Solaris instance that you want to convert and deploying the archive into the new zone or system.

On host systems running Oracle Solaris 11 releases prior to Oracle Solaris 11.2, you must use legacy archives for zone conversion, as documented in those earlier releases.