zoning out
After getting the Ultra 60 setup with Solaris Express 4/05, I’m now in love with Solaris Zones.
root@bradford:/> zoneadm list -vc ID NAME STATUS PATH 0 global running / 1 bradford2 running /zone/bradford2 3 bradford3 running /zone/bradford3
The global zone is using DNS. The “bradford2″ zone is using NIS, and the “bradford3″ zone is using LDAP authentication. I’ll be setting up a “bradford4″ zone to run a LDAP-to-NIS gateway (PADL’s ypldapd) in for final testing before I put it in a production environment.
This is so nice - no more stacks of machines! If I need another “system”, I just create another zone and fire it up.
I wonder if I can have the global zone running Solaris Express and another zone doing OpenSolaris compiles and tests…
April 28th, 2005 at 10:45 pm
I am testing zone also (Solaris 10 x86 guest under qemu under Solaris 9 x86 host).
Non-global zone is sharing the same Solaris kernel with
global zone.
You will need an emulation software like qemu
to run another kernel.
I am finding out if I can run qemu under zone.
April 29th, 2005 at 4:55 am
Agreed. IMHO, the number 1 advantage of zones is in testing when you simply need a stack of boxes as clients, for instance testing BIND, LDAP or Kerberos, no longer to I have to settle for testing with a single client, I just create a zone for the server and a couple as clients and I have as much and more testing capability as if I had a rack of servers.
I also found zones to be a godsend when I was doing some load balancing testing and debugging of my F5 load balancers, instead of 3 or 4 seperately managed servers to be load balanced plus all the networking needed for such a setup I simply created a heap of zones and only needed 2 (for redunancy) ethers back to the load balancer, which meant less hassle, way less gear, and way more test “systems” to load balance (I scaled up to 20 zones in the end).
Zones rule! Of all the features in Solaris10 it was the first one that really perked my interest as its what I’ve needed for years.