solaris10 branded zones on OpenSolaris
For the past 9 or 10 months I've been pretty much heads down working with Jordan on the Solaris 10 branded zone project. Yesterday we integrated the first phase of this project into OpenSolaris. This brand allows you to run the Solaris 10 10/09 release, or later, inside of a zone running on OpenSolaris. We see this brand as one of the tools which will help people as they transition from running Solaris 10 to OpenSolaris.
We've divided this project into two phases. For this initial integration we have the following features:
- basic brand emulation
The brand emulation works for running the latest version of Solaris 10 (Solaris 10 10/09) on OpenSolaris. A zone running this brand is intended to be functionally equivalent to a native zone on Solaris 10 10/09 with the same configuration. - p2v
A physical-to-virtual capability to install an archive of a system running Solaris 10 10/09 into the branded zone - v2v
A virtual-to-virtual capability to install an archive of a native zone from a system running Solaris 10 10/09 into the branded zone - multiple architecture support
This brand runs on all sun4u, sun4v and x86 architecture machines that OpenSolaris has defined as supported platforms
There are a few limitations with this initial version of the code which we'll work on in the second phase of the project. We'll be adding support for:
- Exclusive IP stack zones
- Delegated ZFS datasets
- The ability to run these branded zones on a system running xVM
- The ability to upgrade the version of Solaris 10 running inside the zone to a later release of Solaris 10
We've done extensive testing of the brand using our internal Solaris 10 test suites and a variety of 3rd party applications. Now that the code has integrated, we're looking forward to getting feedback from more people about their real-world experiences running their own Solaris 10 application stacks inside the zone. If you give this branded zone a try, let us hear about your experiences on the OpenSolaris zones-discuss alias.
Congrats on getting it done. Maybe you'll get to take it easy for a bit :-)
Posted by Dave Miner on October 23, 2009 at 06:52 PM PDT #
Excellent! Solaris 10 branded zones will be very important in some cases for enterprise environments.
What are the plans in regard to Solaris 8/9 branded zones? Are you going to include them in Open Solaris as right now they are Solaris 10 only...
Posted by Robert Milkowski on October 26, 2009 at 09:35 AM PDT #
We've discussed porting the s8/s9 brands to OpenSolaris
but no decision has been made about that yet.
Posted by Gerald Jelinek on October 27, 2009 at 04:51 AM PDT #
Hi,
I am currently running b127 on my system. I was wondering if there is any howto for configuring Solaris 10 container in OpenSolaris.
Do I need to download b118 svr4 package first before doing anything or the necessary code is already included in b127?
Other than the media cast at http://mediacast.sun.com/users/flippedbits/media/s10c-demo-jerry.swf/details, are there any other how-to?
Thanks.
Posted by Deniz on November 14, 2009 at 10:09 AM PST #
B127 includes the the solaris10 brand support but you'll have to
install it first. You need to run:
# pkg install SUNWs10brand
I'll try to write up a new blog entry in the next few days on how to
use the branded zone, but in the meantime you can see some info
on how to setup a zone in the developers guide here:
http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+zones/s10brand_dev_guide#HManuallysetupazoneonatestsystemandtestyourchanges
Posted by Gerald Jelinek on November 17, 2009 at 04:16 PM PST #
Is s10brand also in the SXCE build of snv_127?
Posted by Miles on November 19, 2009 at 12:42 PM PST #