Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
path
can be on NFS, and that step can be changed to a
mount
command on the
destination host.
Thousands of SPARC systems are currently running the Solaris 8 and Solaris
9 operating systems. In most cases, the desire to take advantage of innova-
tions in Oracle Solaris 10 can be fulfilled by migrating the workload to a native
Container on a Solaris 10 system. This process is usually straightforward because
of the binary compatibility from one version of Solaris to the next, backed by the
Solaris Binary Compatibility Guarantee. People often place these workloads into
Containers.
In other situations, such migration proves difficult or uncertain. Perhaps the
workload includes shell scripts that work correctly on Solaris 8 but not on Solaris
10. Perhaps your organization tuned the workload for Solaris, but retuning for
Solaris 10 would require recompiling the software and the source code is no lon-
ger available. Perhaps redeployment in a Solaris 10 environment would require
recertification, which is impractical for hundreds of systems that will be replaced
within the next year anyway. Whatever the reason, you might strongly prefer to
maintain a Solaris 8 environment for the workload, but new SPARC systems will
not run Solaris 8. This raises a key question: Are other options available?
In fact, two related products meet this need: Solaris 8 Containers and Solaris 9
Containers.
6
Each replicates a Solaris 8 (or Solaris 9) environment within a
Container on a Solaris 10 system. All of the software from the original system
runs on the Solaris 10 system without translation or emulation of binary instruc-
tions; the only translations required involve the system calls.
To simplify this process, each product includes a P2V tool that uses an archive
of the file system of the original computer to populate the file system of the new
Container. The entire process typically takes 30-60 minutes to complete and can be
automated. After archiving the original system with
flar
,
tar
,
cpio
, or
pax
, only
four commands are needed to create, boot, and log in to the Container. The following
example assumes that the Solaris 8 system is named
sol8
and that the Solaris 8 and
Solaris 10 systems use
/net/server
as mount points for a shared NFS file system:
sol8#
flarcreate -S -n mys8 /net/server/balrog.flar
...
Archive creation complete.
6.
When this topic went to print, Solaris 8 Containers and Solaris 9 Containers required a combination
support contract and software license. A no-cost download for evaluation is available at
http://www.
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