[OpenIndiana-discuss] Do OI, pkg or beadm expect any special setup for local zones?

[Jim Klimov]

Hello all,

   For years I've been setting up my local zones on SXCE and Solaris 10
somewhat neglecting "the rules", such as the statement that zone roots
should (are encouraged to) reside somehow along with global zone root.
Even back then I was vague on the requirement (if it was one), and it
might have pertained to UFS roots more than ZFS. Nonetheless, in most
of our setups things just worked when zone roots and data were in a
separate ZFS pool from the global zone's rootfs (UFS or ZFS). There
were some things to watch out for, however, during systems upgrades
with LiveUpgrade, which (at some versions) did not expect such layout
and sometimes had to be "helped" manually.

   My current question is: are there any similar concerns with modern
OpenSolaris derivates based on illumos - and primarily with OI?
Are admins free to place local zones wherever they like, and do
subsequent installations and updates work finely with that, or
do the toolset authors still impose some expectations about the
system setup (i.e. that zoneroots must be in rpool, and zone
data/progs may be delegated or loop-mounted from another pool)?

   Also, I've read recently of different users' problems (on lists
and in bugtracker) regarding local zone updates, and it does not
seem like a trivial (single-command) process, but rather a routine
of a few steps (update GZ, detach/reattach LZ with update and/or
do "pkg -R /zone/root image-update", boot the zone, "pkg update"
from inside the zone) - is that impression of non-triviality true?
Do we have the reference procedure on the Wiki somewhere already? ;)

Thanks,
//Jim Klimov

PS: I do understand the benefit of placing zoneroots on rpool
with enabled dedup, but on systems with constrained rpool space
and/or too little RAM for efficient dedup this unrequired feature
may even become a downside.