Kicking the tires of the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant
I mentioned last month that I had taken a quick look at the docs for the new Solaris 8 Migration Assistant (S8MA) product/project and it seemed pretty interesting.
The 30 second recap is you take a flash archive of a Solaris 8 SPARC box and then you create a special zone type on a Solaris 10 SPARC box and you can import the flash archive into a zone and easily virtualize the Solaris 8 machine (assuming it uses userland apps and not app-specific kernel modules).
Last week I was working with a customer and we gave S8MA a quick whirl. We did the following steps to prep:
1) Read through the documentation at http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/1759.1
2) Used jumpstart to build a new machine running Solaris 10 08/07 (aka update 4)
3) Downloaded the S8MA bundle from http://www.sun.com/download/products.xml?id=470c4a45
4) Downloaded patches 125476-02 and 127111-03 from http://sunsolve.sun.com
5) Create a flar image of our Solaris 8 test machine and transfered it to our Solaris 10 machine
root@sol8 # flarcreate -n s8migtest -x /var/tmp -S -c /var/tmp/s8migtest.flar
We then performed the following steps:
1) Booted the S10 box to single user, installed the required patches and rebooted
root@sol10# patchadd 125476-02 127111-03
root@sol10# reboot
2) Added the 3 packages that contain the solaris8 branded zone bits (from the download)
root@sol10# cd s8ma-1_0-rr/Product
root@sol10# pkgadd -d . SUNWs8brandr SUNWs8brandu SUNWs8p2v
4) Built a zfs pool and created a /zones mount point
root@sol10# zpool create zfs c1t1d0
root@sol10# zfs create zfs/zones -o mountpoint=/zones -o atime=off
5) Use zonecfg to create a solaris8 branded zone (we’ll call it s8zone1)
root@sol10# cat zone.cfg
create -b
set zonepath=/zones/s8zone1
set brand=solaris8
set autoboot=true
set ip-type=shared
add net
set address=s8zone1
set physical=e1000g0
end
root@sol10# zonecfg -z s8zone1 -f zone.cfg
6) Use zoneadm to install the zone from the flar archive created earlier
(note the -u and -a options which are specific to solaris8 branded zones)
root@sol10# zoneadm -z s8zone1 install -u -a /path/to/s8migtest.flar
7) Run the p2v tool which adds extra package/patches and checks for /etc/system entries to migration to resource controls
root@sol10# /usr/lib/brand/solaris8/s8_p2v s8zone1
8) Boot the zone
# zoneadm -z s8zone1 boot
9) Login via zone console
# zlogin -C s8zone1
10) Check out the system
In our case we had a bit of a problem where the sysid program didn’t seem to work quite right, but that may have been an anomaly, once we set hostname and nameservice information by hand it worked like a champ.