Solaris 10 Zones

Aug 3rd 2008
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This section provides an introductions to zones within the Solaris 10 operating environment. A zone is Sun’s answer to providing an isolated environment in which a set of service daemons can operate. It’s easy to think of a zone as an advanced ‘chroot jail’ with additional functionality and benefits.

Zone States

A zone can be in one of six states: configured, installed, ready, running and shutdown.

Administering and Configuring Zones

As with many of the recent administrative commands to be made available from Sun in recent years, zone administration can be achieved using the single zoneadm command. This command has a range of parameters allowing you to administer a given zone. Similarly, configuration of a zone can be achieved using the zonecfg command.

Listing zones on a given system:

# zoneadm list -iv

Configuring Zones

Configuring a zone:

# zonecfg -z gibbsie-zone zonecfg:gibbsie-zone> create zonecfg:gibbsie-zone> set zonepath=/export/zones/gibbsie-zone zonecfg:gibbsie-zone> set autoboot=true zonecfg:gibbsie-zone> add net zonecfg:gibbsie-zone:net> set address=10.1.2.3 zonecfg:gibbsie-zone:net> set physical=hme0 zonecfg:gibbsie-zone:net> end zonecfg:gibbsie-zone> commit zonecfg:gibbsie-zone> exit

Installing a Zone

Once configured, a zone can be installed. During this phase, the zone is considered to be ‘incomplete’.

# zoneadm -z gibbsie-zone install

Verifying a Zone

Once installed, a zone can be verified.

# zoneadm -z gibbsie-zone verify

Deleting a Zone

To delete a zone, you have to first uninstall the zone using ‘zoneadm uninstall‘

# zoneadm -z gibbsie-zone uninstall -F

Uninstalling a Zone

Once a zone is uninstalled, you can delete the zone safely. Note, always ensure you uninstall a zone before you delete it.

# zoneadm -z gibbsie-zone delete -F