One thing I forgot to mention about cloning zones with zfs, is that you should boot your "master" zone once before you start cloning it.
If you don't, the cloned zones will have to import all the smf
manifests when they boot for the first time, and this takes a long time. Especially if you are booting a lot of zones at once.
I also found a quirk that I'll file a bug about:
When I create the first clone of my master zone,
it creates a zfs snapshot with name SUNWzone1,
which I can use to create identical clones of the zone:
# zoneadm -z copy2 clone -s pool/zones/master@SUNWzone1
If I make some adjustments to the master zone, e.g. disable some services I don't want to have running, and make a new clone, the zfs snapshot gets named SUNWzone2.
The quirk is that if I delete all zones made out of the SUNWzone1 snapshot,
the SUNWzone1 snapshot is removed.
So I can't create a new zone cloned out of the original configuration (SUNWzone1).
I'll file an rfe to get an option for zoneadm uninstall to leave the snapshot alone, even if there are no zones based on it any more.
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