zones: Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration

Since the release of Solaris 10 Update 9 I was interested in trying out its new capabilities. One of which was to move from an existing Oracle Solaris 10 Physical system to a virtual container quickly and easily on a separate system. And also the Host ID migration feature which it also allows.

In this post I will provide a demonstration of P2V , migrating a physical Solaris system into a zone, using Host ID migration, keeping in mind in this example both systems are built from a Solaris 10 Update 9 release and is a ZFS on root build.





1. Collect the system information you wish to be migrated into a zone.
Obtain the hostname:

 # hostname

Obtain the hostid:

 # hostid

 
Obtain the root passwd
View what software being run on the system if necessary
Check the network configuration on the system:

 # ifconfig -a   

View the storage utilized for example the contents of /etc/vfstab
View the amount of local disk storage in use, and determine the target host has enough space for the install
Examine the /etc/system of any specific or unique changes you may wish to keep or change once the  environment has been virtualized.

2. Use the flarcreate command to create a flash archive image of the system you wish to migrate.
Login as root to the source system and change to the root directory.

 # cd /

   
Run the flarcreate using the following options:
Note: Here I have used the option to compress using the -c , used the archived method with cpio, you can use pax if you wish, then supplied the content name identifier of the archive using the -n option (best practice s10u9-system-name), also I have used the -y option because this system has a separate /var dataset and is ZFS on root based, then supplied the path destination of the flar archive creation.
When the flar creation is running be sure to monitor and review any errors thoroughly.

 # flarcreate -c -L cpio -n name -y /var /path/to/flar

3. Transfer the flar archive created to the destination target host.

4. Create a new zone configuration on the target host:
Note: I don't want to inherit any packages from the global or any loop-back file systems, so I have created a whole root zone configuration and provided a new  ip-address as I don't want it to conflict with the existing migrated host as its still alive.

Also you will see I have added a hostid entry in the zone configuration, when applications are migrated from a physical Solaris system into a zone on a new system, the hostid changes to be the hostid of the new machine. In some cases, applications depend on the original hostid, and it is not possible to update the application configuration. In these cases, the zone can be configured to use the hostid of the original system. This is done by setting a zonecfg property to specify the hostid as shown below. The value used should be the output of the hostid command as run on the original system previously.

 # zonecfg -z hostname
 hostname: No such zone configured
 Use 'create' to begin configuring a new zone.
 zonecfg:hostname> create -b
 zonecfg:hostname> set autoboot=true
 zonecfg:hostname> set zonepath=/zones/hostname
 zonecfg:hostname> set bootargs="-m verbose"
 zonecfg:hostname> set hostid=84###375
 zonecfg:hostname> add net
 zonecfg:hostname:net> set physical=bge0
 zonecfg:hostname:net> set address=ip-address
 zonecfg:hostname:net> end
 zonecfg:hostname> verify
 zonecfg:hostname> commit
 zonecfg:hostname> exit

5. Installing the zone on the target system using the flar archive created. Become root user and install the configured zone using the install -a option and the path to the flar archive created. Noticed I have used the -p option becuase I want to preserve the system identity, the zone will have the same identity as the system used to create the image. You can use the -u to sys-unconfig the zone.
Best practice make sure you tail the zone installation log file and ensure no errors are found.

 # zoneadm -z hostname install -p -a /path/to/flar
 A ZFS file system has been created for this zone.
       Log File: /var/tmp/hostname.install_log.IQaGnI
     Installing: This may take several minutes...
 Postprocessing: This may take a while...
    Postprocess: Updating the zone software to match the global zone...
    Postprocess: Zone software update complete
    Postprocess: Updating the image to run within a zone

         Result: Installation completed successfully.
       Log File: /zones/hostname/root/var/log/hostname.install17462.log

6. Boot the zone into single user mode and login via the console and of course use the root password from your migrated host. Make any necessary checks.

 # zoneadm -z hostname boot -s
 # zlogin -C hostname

From here you can see the P2V is complete, hostname and data has been kept intact including the host-id.
Now you can decide whether you need to make any further necessary changes such as hostname, network configuration etc etc. And of course be prepared to boot the migrated zone for a live production environment.