Erik Trimble <[email protected]> writes:
> Naturally, with all the re-alignment of the various virtualization
> technologies available for Solaris, I'm left with an old question that I
> can't seem to find out if there's a new answer.
>
> I'm looking to run a Solaris 8 zone/container on an OpenSolaris x64 host,
> not a SPARC host. Yes, I know I could do this via VirtualBox, but there
> are good reasons I would rather run in a zone.
Right: I had the misfortune trying to get Solaris 8 and 9 to run in any
of the x86 virtualization solutions for the GCC project recently:
http://www.cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de/~ro/gcc/
The experience was a nightmare: S8 on xVM just doesn't work, and nobody
got it working. S9, though claimed to work, crashes immediately when
booting off the DVD image. VirtualBox is a bit better, though only
slightly: an S9 VM with 4 CPUs only uses 2 cores on a X4600, and if you
configure with 2 CPUs, S9 sees only one. Determining the VirtualBox
configuration that allowed S9 to boot at all was troublesome, and took
*many* iterations. S8 is even worse: while it worked booting off a DVD
image, booting off the disk image crashed immediately, and booting kadb
crashed either. I have a working single-CPU configuration running right
now, but it's a shame given the 16 cores available in the X4600.
If I compare this to S8 and S9 branded zones on a T5220 running
OpenSolaris and a S10 LDom, it worked like a charme and is immensely
scalable. I prefer this seamless form of virtualization every minute :-)
> We used to support S8 containers in S10 on SPARC, but I can't sift through
> all the blizzard of product literature to see if we now support S8 zones on
> S10/OpenSolaris x64.
Unfortunately, they aren't available:
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zones-discuss/2009-October/005569.html
> I now see that we do S10 zones on OpenSolaris x64, and naturally, BrandZ
> (linux) zones run on S10 & OpenSolaris x64. So, I'm a bit hopeful...
I've got no idea if this will ever happen. It would mean that sites
cannot migrate to the enterprise release of Solaris 11, even on SPARC,
since Solaris 8/9 branded zones aren't available at all on Nevada right
now.
There's not much hope for lx (Linux) zones, either: I happened to come
across this line on
http://arc.opensolaris.org/caselog/PSARC/2010/
PSARC/2010/169 EOF lx brand Gerald Jelinek waiting fast-track 05/20/2010
Unpublished
Apart from that line, the community wasn't even informed of the demise
of lx zones ;-(
Rainer
--
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Rainer Orth, Center for Biotechnology, Bielefeld University
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