Oracle Solaris 11 Zone Features

• Oracle Solaris 10 branded zones – Oracle Solaris 10 Zones provide an Oracle Solaris 10 environment on Oracle Solaris 11. You can migrate an Oracle Solaris 10 system or zone to a solaris10 zone on an Oracle Solaris 11 system in the following ways:

  • Create a zone archive and use the archive to create an s10zone on the Oracle Solaris 11 system. See Transitioning an Oracle Solaris 10 Instance to an Oracle Solaris 11 System.

  • Detach the zone from the Oracle Solaris 10 system and attach the zone on the Oracle Solaris 11 zone. The zone is halted and detached from its current host. The zonepath is moved to the target host, where it is attached. See About Detaching and Attaching the solaris10 Zone in Oracle Solaris 11.1 Administration: Oracle Solaris Zones, Oracle Solaris 10 Zones, and Resource Management.

• Oracle Solaris 11 installation support – You can specify the configuration and installation of non-global zones as part of an AI client installation. Non-global zones are installed and configured on the first reboot after the global zone is installed. See Chapter 12, Installing and Configuring Zones, in Installing Oracle Solaris 11.1 Systems.

• Whole root zones only – Oracle Solaris Zones are whole-root type only, but you can configure your zones in a more flexible way, such as when disk space is limited or if you prefer a read-only zone root configuration. By default, zone boot environments are compressed.

  In addition, you can automatically update any non-global zone to ensure consistency across the system. An added benefit is individual software stacks for each non-global zone are independent of the global zone.

• Legacy branded zones – The following legacy branded zone features are only supported in Oracle Solaris 10 releases:

  • Linux brand (lx)

  • Oracle Solaris 8 Containers (solaris8)

  • Oracle Solaris 9 Containers (solaris9)

• Exclusive IP zones by default – Exclusive-IP zones enable you to assign a separate IP stack per zone. Each zone has the flexibility to configure IP within that stack completely separate to other zones. You can easily observe network traffic, per zone, and apply individual network resources. In previous versions of Oracle Solaris this was dependent on the number of physical NICs per system. The addition of network virtualization provides enhanced flexibility when managing zones, without the restrictions of physical network hardware. Newly created zones in Oracle Solaris 11 are exclusive-IP zones with a VNIC, net0, whose underlying lower link is automatically selected at boot time. See Part II, Oracle Solaris Zones, in Oracle Solaris 11.1 Administration: Oracle Solaris Zones, Oracle Solaris 10 Zones, and Resource Management.

• Network virtualization for zones – Oracle Solaris 11 network virtualization features can be applied to a zone by creating a virtual NIC (VNIC) for the zone and applying bandwidth limits and traffic flows to the zone's assigned VNIC. The VNIC is created when the zone boots and deleted when the zone halts, and will be created within the non-global zone's datalink namespace. This feature allows you to provision a zone without having to learn the details of network configuration and topology. If you want to assign a preexisting datalink to an exclusive-IP zone, you can still do so during the zone configuration.

  For example, create a virtual NIC, limit the SPEED of the VNIC, create an address for it, and then assign it to zone.

  # dladm create-vnic -l net0 -p maxbw=600 vnic0
  # ipadm create-addr -T static -a local=x.x.x.x/24 vnic0/v4static
  .
  .
  zonecfg:s11zone> set ip-type=exclusive
  zonecfg:s11zone> add net
  zonecfg:s11zone:net> set physical=vnic0
  zonecfg:s11zone:net> end
  .
  .

  The ip-type value for the zone can either be shared or exclusive:

  • The ip-type=exclusive value means that you are dedicating a datalink, which can be a virtual (VNIC) for exclusive use by the zone. This strategy brings some of the network stack management benefits to the zone. Historically, this has not been practical if a system has many zones, but only a maximum of 4 network interfaces.

    Exclusive IP is now the recommended ip-type for zones. The set physical value identifies the system's network interface cards that is assigned to the zone. Using an ip-type of exclusive allows the zone to manage its IP stack directly.

  • If ip-type=shared was identified in the above example, you would have to specify an IP address and other resources.

• NFS server support in non-global zones – You can share file systems in a non-global zones by using the NFS protocol. The SMB (CIFS) sharing protocol is not currently available in a non-global zone.

• Zone monitoring – System resources that are consumed by non-global zones can be monitored by using the zonestat command.

• Immutable Zones – The file-mac-profile property enables you to run a non-global zone with a read-only root file system. See zonecfg file-mac-profile Property in Oracle Solaris 11.1 Administration: Oracle Solaris Zones, Oracle Solaris 10 Zones, and Resource Management.

Oracle Solaris 11.1 Zones Features

The following Oracle Solaris zone enhancements are available in the Oracle Solaris 11.1 release.

• Parallel zone updates – A system with multiple Oracle Solaris zones is now updated in parallel. The increase in speed for updating 20 zones is in the 4x range.

• Improved install and attach performance – Installing a zone is 27 percent faster and attaching a zone is 91 percent faster. These performance improvements mean that a planned service window of a system with Oracle Solaris zones can be shorter because installing and updating Oracle Solaris zones is much faster.

• Zone file system statistics – A per-fstype kstat (kernel statistic) for each zone is provided so that you can monitor file system activity in each non-global zone. In addition, a kstat is available for monitoring the global zone.

• Zones on shared storage – Deployment and migration of Oracle Solaris zones can be simplified by running zones on arbitrary storage objects like Fibre Channel devices or iSCSI targets. You can configure a device path directly with the zonecfg command. The zone is automatically encapsulated into its own ZFS storage pool.

See Oracle Solaris 11.1 Administration: Oracle Solaris Zones, Oracle Solaris 10 Zones, and Resource Management.

Oracle Solaris 10 Branded Zones Preparation

Prepare for migrating a Oracle Solaris 10 OS instance or zone to your Oracle Solaris 11 system.

• Confirm that your Oracle Solaris 10 instance or zone is running the Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 release, which is the minimum OS requirement.

• Confirm that your Oracle Solaris 10 instance or zone is the same platform as the system migration target. You can only migrate a SPARC instance to a SPARC system and an x86 instance to an x86 based system.

• Download and run the /usr/sbin/zonep2vchk script on the Oracle Solaris 10 system to determine if any issues would prevent the Oracle Solaris 10 zone or instance from running successfully on an Oracle Solaris 11 system.

  On an Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 system, the /usr/sbin/zonep2vchk utility is included in the release. For a system running an older Oracle Solaris 10 release, download the unbundled package from Oracle Technology Network (OTN):

  http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris10/downloads

  Keep in mind that this script is only for system migration purposes.

• Enable the Oracle Solaris 10 package and patch tools.

  To use the Oracle Solaris 10 package and patch tools in your Oracle Solaris 10 zones, install the following patches on your source Oracle Solaris 10 system before the image is created.

  • 119254-75, 119534-24, 140914-02 (SPARC platforms)

  • 119255-75, 119535-24 and 140915-02 (x86 platforms)

  The physical to virtual (P2V) process works without the patches, but the package and patch tools do not work properly within the Oracle Solaris 10 zones unless these patches are installed.