For the past 9 or 10 months I’ve been pretty much heads down working with
Jordan
on the
Solaris 10 branded zone
project. Yesterday we
integrated
the first phase of this project into OpenSolaris.
This brand allows you to run the
Solaris 10 10/09
release, or later, inside of a zone running on
OpenSolaris.
We see this brand as one of the tools which will help people as they
transition from running Solaris 10 to OpenSolaris.

We’ve divided this project into two phases. For this initial integration
we have the following features:

• basic brand emulation
  The brand emulation works for running the latest version of Solaris 10
  (Solaris 10 10/09) on OpenSolaris.
  A zone running this brand is intended to be functionally equivalent to a
  native zone on Solaris 10 10/09 with the same configuration.
• p2v
  A physical-to-virtual capability to install an archive of a system running
  Solaris 10 10/09 into the branded zone
• v2v
  A virtual-to-virtual capability to install an archive of a native zone from
  a system running Solaris 10 10/09 into the branded zone
• multiple architecture support
  This brand runs on all sun4u, sun4v and x86 architecture machines that
  OpenSolaris has defined as supported platforms

There are a few limitations with this initial version of the code which
we’ll work on in the second phase of the project. We’ll be adding support
for:

• Exclusive IP stack zones
• Delegated ZFS datasets
• The ability to run these branded zones on a system running xVM
• The ability to upgrade the version of Solaris 10 running inside the
  zone to a later release of Solaris 10

We’ve done extensive testing of the brand using our internal Solaris 10
test suites and a variety of 3rd party applications.
Now that the code has integrated, we’re looking forward to getting
feedback from more people about their real-world experiences running
their own Solaris 10 application stacks inside the zone. If you give this
branded zone a try, let us hear about your experiences on the OpenSolaris
zones-discuss
alias.

The Deploying OpenSolaris Deep Dive on Tuesday at
Community One
is free if you register using the promotional code OSDDT. The session doesn’t start until
11:00 am so that people can still attend the JaveOne key note.

Chris Armes will start with an overview
of deploying OpenSolaris in the data center. After lunch
Ben Rockwood
will be delivering a two hour presentation on ZFS. This promises to be the highlight
of the session.
Nick, one of my co-authors on the
OpenSolaris Bible,
will then talk about high availability and I’ll wrap up with a talk on how to use zones
for consolidation.

Jordan just posted a nice
blog
about the work we’ve been doing for
Solaris 10 branded zones
running on
OpenSolaris.
His post also has a link to a Flash demo we put together
showing the process of migrating a standalone Solaris 10 system into a zone
on OpenSolaris. Both of us will be at
Community One West
and we’ll be running the branded zone in the virtualization pod. If you’re there and interested, stop
by to check it out. I’ll also be talking about this project as part of my presentations.