Oracle Solaris Containers - Oracle Solaris 10 System Virtualization Essentials - page 218

space that is shared with the system to which it is being moved, the Container can
be “attached” and booted on the new system immediately. 4
Obviously, shared storage for the Container or the data of its workload smoothes
Container migration considerably. Ops Center can manage multiple Containers
whose contents are shared among systems via NFS. 5
Migrating a Container is usually a straightforward process. The “How to Move
a Solaris Container” guide, available at http://www.sun.com/software/so-
laris/howto_guides.jsp , describes the possibilities in more detail. Here is an
example session:

hostA-GZ# zoneadm -z twilight detach
hostA-GZ# cd /zones/roots/twilight
hostA-GZ# pax -w@f /tmp/twilight.pax -p e *
hostA-GZ# scp /tmp/twilight.pax root@hostB:/tmp/twilight.pax

hostB-GZ# mkdir -m 700 -p /zones/roots/dusk

hostB-GZ# cd /zones/roots/dusk
hostB-GZ# pax -r@f /tmp/twilight.pax -p e
hostB-GZ# zonecfg -z dusk
zonecfg:dusk> create -a /zones/roots/dusk
zonecfg:dusk> exit
hostB-GZ# zoneadm -z dusk attach

At this point, the new Container can be reconfigured with its new IP address
and any resource controls you want to set. When it is ready, you can boot it. Of
course, all of that activity can be automated.
The destination system must be configured to have the same update of Oracle
Solaris, or a newer update, than the original system. If the destination is newer,
you should use the -u option to the attach subcommand.
The -u option can also be used when patching or upgrading a system that in-
cludes Containers to minimize the time it takes to complete those tasks. The first
step is detaching all of the Containers, followed by patching or upgrading the
system. When those steps are complete, the Containers may be quickly reattached
to the system with the attach -u subcommand to zoneadm .
If the Container's zonepath resides on shared storage—for example, on a
SAN—the step that transfers the archived Container can be changed to a series
of steps that make the file system unavailable to the original host and available to
the destination host. If you use Ops Center 2.5 or newer, the Container's zone-

4. See the “How to Move a Solaris Container” guide at http://www.sun.com for various configurations.

5. Chapter 9, “Virtualization Management,” discusses Ops Center.