Migrating an Existing Zone on an Oracle Solaris 10 System

Before a physical system can be migrated, any existing non-global zones on the system must be archived and moved into zones on the new target system first.

How to Migrate an Existing native Non-Global Zone

Use the V2V process to migrate an existing zone on your Solaris 10 system to a solaris10 brand zone on a system running the Oracle Solaris 11 release.

1. Print the existing zone's configuration. You will need this information to recreate the zone on the destination system:

   source# zonecfg -z my-zone info
   zonename: my-zone
   zonepath: /zones/my-zone
   brand: native
   autoboot: false
   bootargs:
   pool:
   limitpriv:
   scheduling-class:
   ip-type: shared
   hostid: 1337833f
   inherit-pkg-dir:
            dir: /lib
   inherit-pkg-dir:
            dir: /platform
   inherit-pkg-dir:
            dir: /sbin
   inherit-pkg-dir:
            dir: /usr
   net:
            address: 192.168.0.90
            physical: bge0

2. Halt the zone:

   source# zoneadm -z my-zone halt

   You should not archive a running zone because the application or system data within the zone might be captured in an inconsistent state.

3. (Optional) If the zone is a sparse root zone that has inherit-pkg-dir settings, then first ready the zone so that the inherited directories will be archived:

   source# zoneadm -s my-zone ready

4. Archive the zone with the zonepath /zones/my-zone.
   • Create a gzip compressed cpio archive named my-zone.cpio.gz for the zone, which will still be named my-zone on the target system:

     source# cd /zones
     source# find my-zone -print | cpio -oP@ | gzip >/zones/my-zone.cpio.gz

   • Create the archive from within the zonepath if you intend to rename the zone on the target system:

     source# cd /zones/my-zone
     source# find root -print | cpio -oP@ | gzip >/zones/my-zone.cpio.gz

5. Transfer the archive to the target Oracle Solaris 11.1 system, using any file transfer mechanism to copy the file, such as:

   • The sftp command described in the sftp(1) man page

   • NFS mounts

   • Any other file transfer mechanism to copy the file.

6. On the target system, recreate the zone.

   target# zonecfg -z my-zone
   my-zone: No such zone configured
   Use 'create' to begin configuring a new zone.
   zonecfg:my-zone> create -t SYSsolaris10
   zonecfg:my-zone> set zonepath=/zones/my-zone
   ... 

   ---

   Note - The zone's brand must be solaris10 and the zone cannot use any inherit-pkg-dir settings, even if the original zone was configured as a sparse root zone. See Part II, Oracle Solaris Zones for information on inherit-pkg-dir resources.

   If the destination system has different hardware, different network interfaces, or other devices or file systems that must be configured on the zone, you must update the zone's configuration. See Chapter 16, Non-Global Zone Configuration (Overview) Chapter 17, Planning and Configuring Non-Global Zones (Tasks), and About Migrating a Zone.

   ---

7. Display the zone's configuration:

   target# zonecfg -z my-zone info
   zonename: my-zone
   zonepath: /zones/my-zone
   brand: solaris10
   autoboot: false
   bootargs:
   pool:
   limitpriv:
   scheduling-class:
   ip-type: shared
   hostid: 1337833f
   net:
            address: 192.168.0.90
            physical: bge0

8. Install the zone from the archive that was created on the source system, with the archive transferred into the /zones directory on the destination system:

   target# zoneadm -z my-zone install -a /zones/my-zone.cpio.gz 

   Once the zone installation has completed successfully, the zone is ready to boot.

   You can save the zone's archive for possible later use, or remove it from the system.

   To remove the archive from the destination system:

   target# rm /zones/myzone.cpio.gz