[OpenIndiana-discuss] solaris10 branded zones

[Jim Klimov]

Hello all,

   I am currently helping evacuate data/OS from a legacy system
that ran Solaris 10u3 (11/06) in a VM until recently - hypervisor
host died - with tasks stuffed into a number of local zones, in
whole roots over dedicated UFS SVM "partitions". The customer
has decided to migrate the services ASAP into another VM on
another box, which currently has Windows and can run VirtualBox,
by salvaging as many bytes as possible from the old installation.
Possibly, later a new dedicated hypervisor will be provided
(likely ESX, or native OI+zones+VirtualBox, maybe SmartOS+KVM...)

   Our foreseeable options are to migrate into a new VM:
1) as is, rsync'ing the data from the old VM or even importing
    its disk image if that works

2) into solaris 10u8 "golden image" and possibly updating the
    OS parts for the local zones in the process (detact/attach -u)

3) into OI and stuff old tasks "as is" into solaris10 branded
    zones; maybe later migrate at least some tasks to native
    OI zones.

   I am partial to the OI variant, as it gives more flexibility
with networking setup and other bonuses. What I am not sure about
is the current state of affairs with the solaris10 zones:

* is it enough to copy the zoneroot (whole root zones) and just
   run it? (the global zone was nothing but a zonehoster)

* are there limitations to the solaris 10 release which must be
   imported into a branded zone? I know that there may be problems
   due to mismatch of ZFS between kernel and zone, but it is not
   planned to delegate datasets into these zones at the moment.

* is it possible to "attach -u" or liveupgrade local zones that
   are branded in OI (i.e. import sol10u3 and turn it into sol10u8)?

Thanks for ideas and warnings,
//Jim Klimov