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Month: October 2009

For the past 9 or 10 months I’ve been pretty much heads down working with
Jordan
on the
Solaris 10 branded zone
project. Yesterday we
integrated
the first phase of this project into OpenSolaris.
This brand allows you to run the
Solaris 10 10/09
release, or later, inside of a zone running on
OpenSolaris.
We see this brand as one of the tools which will help people as they
transition from running Solaris 10 to OpenSolaris.

We’ve divided this project into two phases. For this initial integration
we have the following features:

  • basic brand emulation
    The brand emulation works for running the latest version of Solaris 10
    (Solaris 10 10/09) on OpenSolaris.
    A zone running this brand is intended to be functionally equivalent to a
    native zone on Solaris 10 10/09 with the same configuration.
  • p2v
    A physical-to-virtual capability to install an archive of a system running
    Solaris 10 10/09 into the branded zone
  • v2v
    A virtual-to-virtual capability to install an archive of a native zone from
    a system running Solaris 10 10/09 into the branded zone
  • multiple architecture support
    This brand runs on all sun4u, sun4v and x86 architecture machines that
    OpenSolaris has defined as supported platforms

There are a few limitations with this initial version of the code which
we’ll work on in the second phase of the project. We’ll be adding support
for:

  • Exclusive IP stack zones
  • Delegated ZFS datasets
  • The ability to run these branded zones on a system running xVM
  • The ability to upgrade the version of Solaris 10 running inside the
    zone to a later release of Solaris 10

We’ve done extensive testing of the brand using our internal Solaris 10
test suites and a variety of 3rd party applications.
Now that the code has integrated, we’re looking forward to getting
feedback from more people about their real-world experiences running
their own Solaris 10 application stacks inside the zone. If you give this
branded zone a try, let us hear about your experiences on the OpenSolaris
zones-discuss
alias.

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