Consolidating Solaris 8 servers using zones
I just took a look at the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant 1.0 documentation and the concept looks pretty sweet. In a nutshell, you take a flash archive image of a machine running Solaris 8 and then on a Solaris 10 08/07 + patches machine you create a new “solaris8″ branded zone and install the archive. A “solaris8″ branded zone has a few special features versus standard zones like:
- you can specify a hostid
- patches to the global zone don’t get applied
Now, the kernel that will be running is a Solaris 10 kernel, so a solaris8 zone won’t help you run special device drivers in the zone, but all your userland libraries will be the same as the source machine (and you get all the benefits of being under a Solaris 10 kernel like DTrace from the global zone).
It will be interesting to try this out. I love Solaris 10 but know there are a ton of customers with large install bases of Solaris 8 machines that are worried about the migration effort. I bet you can pretty easily move a lot of older SPARC boxes onto one of the new Niagara 2 based machines with this new virtualization method.