Sean O'Dell has written a three-part tutorial on setting up Solaris Zones within an instance of OpenSolaris 2009.06 in the Amazon Cloud EC2 by utilizing the virtual networking features provided by Crossbow. His step-by-step guide explains how to get the environment up and running, and how to use Crossbow with NAT to build a complete virtual network connecting multiple Zones within a Solaris EC2 host.

Part 1

In this section, prerequisites are outlined, including the need for a basic understanding of AWS EC2 and OpenSolaris. Building the environment and private network are covered as well as creating and configuring Zones. He walks readers through creating three EBS volumes: one for shared software, one for zones storage, and another one for zones backup.

Part 2

This portion of the tutorial describes how to use ZFS and AWS snapshots to backup the zones. O'Dell uses the three EBS volumes created in Part 1 to demonstrate the backup process. He outlines three incidents where restoration of operations is required and shows how to do it. These include:

• User deleted a file or a handful of files in the zone
• User did something catastrophic such as "rm -r *" while in the /usr directory
• The EBS volume containing the zones ZFS pool crashed

Part 3

The steps required in saving a fully configured environment using a AMI and EBS snapshots, which can then be cloned and up and running in minutes, are illustrated. O'Dell covers

• how to halt and detach zones in the EC2 environment,
• create a EBS snapshot of the zones ZFS pool,
• create a EBS volume from the above snapshot, and then
• launch a new EC2 instance and bring up the zones.

More Information

OpenSolaris documentation

ZFS documentation

Amazon Web Services (AWS) documentation

Hardened OpenSolaris 2009.06 on Amazon EC2 Released

OpenSolaris 2009.06 and New OpenSolaris Subscriptions [...read more...]

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