Cloning zones in Solaris 10 6/06

I’m in the process of setting up a machine to host several SAMP (Solaris-Apache-MySQL-PHP) containers. I decided that it would be very efficient to create a generic zone and clone it over and over again. From reading up on the subject it seemed more than possible, after all, what is a zone besides a config file and a filesystem?

I googled for “Cloning Solaris Zones” and found lots of documentation on the zoneadm clone feature. I started to follow the howtos and hit a brick wall… my zoneadm doesn’t know how to clone. Deeper digging shows that the documentation on Sun’s site was for Solaris Express- Sun’s bleeding edge version of OpenSolaris- Can I say “How useless!”

I continued to google, after all I was very close I have the configuration and the filesystem, I just need to connect the two. I found the zoneadm attach/detach commands. This sounds perfect to me but alas my zoneadm doesn’t support attach/detach. Apparently, this feature is only available from Solaris 11/06- Can someone tell me when Sun started releasing new OS versions every 6 months!

I had no intention of giving up and here is the process which evolved:

1. Setup the “Gold Master” zone including all the services, users, passwords, etc. (I’m assuming that your zonepath is a ZFS filesystem- this has it’s pluses and minuses so don’t take my word on it.)
2. Halt the Master zone and export the config file to your zone template file:
   

   zoneadm -z master halt
   zonecfg -z master export -f /root/template

3. It should look something like this: (edit with values for new zone)
   

   create -b
   set zonepath=/zfszones/zoneclone
   set autoboot=true
   set pool=work1-pool
   add inherit-pkg-dir
   set dir=/lib
   end
   add inherit-pkg-dir
   set dir=/platform
   end
   add inherit-pkg-dir
   set dir=/sbin
   end
   add inherit-pkg-dir
   set dir=/usr
   end
   add net
   set address=192.168.0.2
   set physical=bge0
   end
   add rctl
   set name=zone.cpu-shares
   add value (priv=privileged,limit=10,action=none)
   end

4. Configure a new zone using the new config file:
   

   zonecfg -z zoneclone -f zoneclone.cfg

5. Create a ZFS snapshot of the master zone:
   

   zfs snapshot zfspool/master@040207

6. Clone the ZFS snapshot
   

   zfs clone zfspool/master@040207 zfspool/zoneclone

7. Mount the new ZFS filesystem at the correct zonepath
   

   zfs setmountpoint=/zfszones/zoneclone/ zfspool/zoneclone

8. Change the zone state to “installed” -WARNING: I have no idea if this is a good idea but it seems to work.
   

   vi /etc/zones/index

   Find a line that looks like:
   zoneclone:configured:/zfszones/zoneclone:0000003c-ffbf-f825-ffbf-f80001000000

   Replace it with:
   zoneclone:installed:/zfszones/zoneclone:0000003c-ffbf-f825-ffbf-f80001000000

9. Boot the new zone:
   

   zoneadm -z zoneclone boot

Tags: apache, Cloning, MySQL, OpenSolaris, php, solaris, solaris 10, sysadmin, zones

This entry was posted on February 4, 2007 at February 4, 2007 and is filed under Tips, Unix. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.