There is a redbook at the z/vm site that may help you. It discusses the use of a basevol (containing shared r/o code) and mounting a guestvol (server unique code r/w over the r/o basevol directories). For example, the basevol is initially built and it has an /etc. The clone will link r/o to the basevol /etc. In the startup scripts for the clone a minidisk that is r/w is mounted over /etc using the mount - - bind option. It looks good in the redbook and I have tried it with a couple of linux clones. It seems to work, although I have had some problems with some process trying to write into a r/o directory. Anyhow, the book explains it much better.
See: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246824.pdf Eric Sammons <[EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] t.frb.org> cc: Sent by: Linux on Subject: Cloned guests and upgrades 390 Port <[EMAIL PROTECTED] IST.EDU> 07/03/2003 06:05 AM Please respond to Linux on 390 Port I wanted to get an idea of what others are doing in the way of cloning and then upgrading their z/VM - z/Linux guests. I am running SuSE Linux 7.x and will soon be upgrading to SuSE 8. In our Proof of Concept their is a great desire to share binaries. I; however, can not figure a practical way of doing this that helps given that all the "system specific" configurations are in /etc and /etc could and likely will change as a result of upgrading. Because /etc is system specific it can not be shared, and because /etc may be impacted by an upgrade of the OS it is not as straight forward as sharing /usr and then only upgrading the one system where /usr is the master. Is anyone using binary sharing? If so what for and how is it benefiting? Is it helping in the area of system upgrades? Thanks! Eric Sammons (804)697-3925 FRIT - Infrastructure Engineering
