[OpenIndiana-discuss] Moving /var and/or /usr to own zfs filesystem

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-09-05 01:33, Christopher X. Candreva wrote:
> As far as I remember I split if off by hand myself, after installing. The
> thing is, it doesn't work on the new mahcine I'm trying that on.
>
> However, you may have just convinced me NOT to. I have to admit, I'm
> essentially comming from Solaris 8 (I've run some 10 machines, but not used
> zfs extensives and haven't used Zones at all). However I think I finally
> understand what boot environments do, why the filesystems are
> consolidated, and what package management has to do with it.

Well, these things all have their reasoning, at least for the default
case, even if I personally disagree and tweak my setups differently ;)

> Can zones be easily copied to other machines, like VM images ?

Pretty much yes, as long as the global zone OS version is the same on
both machines (there are many kernel-libc-zfs-... interactions that
do require coherent versions to be running). Easiness of such porting
depends on complexity of your customizations - such as delegated ZFS
into the zones vs. also storing them as singular filesystems, network
setup (delegated VNICs probably most common today). But in short - it
works after a little massage :)

//Jim