Physical-to-Virtual or p2v, should make life easier for users who need to migrate their Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 OS based systems into a zone on Solaris 10. Jerry Jelinek's blog explains how users can create an image of an existing system using a flash archive, cpio archive, a UFS dump, or even just a file system image that is accessible over NFS, and then install the zone using that image. There is no explicit p2v tool one needs to run, Jelinek writes because behind the scenes, the zone installation process does all of the work to make sure the Solaris 8 image runs correctly inside of the zone.

As the first paragraph mentions, the zones team created the p2v capability for both Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 before considering the value of having that capability for native zones as well. Here the major task was learning how to synch the system image to match the global zone since, otherwise, bugs of every imaginable (and some unimaginable) sorts might develop.

The answer lay in the additional capability the team calls "update on attach," which enables automatic updates of the zone software when it is moved to the new host, Jelinek asserts.

Update on attach also applies to p2v, as it is the enabling capability p2v requires, Jelinek writes. The zones team leveraged and reused Dan Price's work on Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 installers. According to the author, the native brand installer accepts a variety of image inputs; flar, cpio, compressed cpio, pax xustar, UFS dump or a directly accessible root image (e.g. over NFS).

The team also enhanced the native brand installer to accept a pre-existing image in the zone root path, he adds, which is useful if you use ZFS send and receive to set up the zone root and want to then p2v that as a fully installed zone.

Jelinek adds that he recently integrated the native p2v feature into NV build 109, mentioning also that the webrev from the code review is still available if anyone is interested in seeing the scope of the changes. At over 2000 lines of new code this is a pretty substantial addition to zones which should greatly improve future zone consolidation projects.

More Information

Jelinek\'s p2v blog

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