Chapter 19

About Installing, Halting, and Uninstalling Non-Global Zones (Overview)

This chapter discusses zone installation on your Solaris system. It also describes the two processes that manage the virtual platform and the application environment, zoneadmd and zsched. Information about halting, rebooting, and uninstalling zones is also provided.

The following topics are addressed in this chapter:

To clone a non-global zone, install and boot a non-global zone, or to halt or uninstall a non-global zone, see Chapter 20, Installing, Booting, Halting, Uninstalling, and Cloning Non-Global Zones (Tasks).

For information about lx branded zone installation, see Chapter 32, About Installing, Booting, Halting, and Uninstalling lx Branded Zones (Overview) and Chapter 33, Installing, Booting, Halting, Uninstalling and Cloning lx Branded Zones (Tasks).

Zone Installation and Administration Concepts

The zoneadm command described in the zoneadm(1M) man page is the primary tool used to install and administer non-global zones. Operations using the zoneadm command must be run from the global zone. The following tasks can be performed using the zoneadm command:

Verify a zone
Install a zone
Change the state of an installed zone to incomplete
Boot a zone, which is similar to booting a regular Solaris system
Display information about a running zone
Halt a zone
Reboot a zone
Uninstall a zone
Relocate a zone from one point on a system to another point on the same system
Provision a new zone based on the configuration of an existing zone on the same system
Migrate a zone, used with the zonecfg command

For zone installation and verification procedures, see Chapter 20, Installing, Booting, Halting, Uninstalling, and Cloning Non-Global Zones (Tasks) and the zoneadm(1M) man page. Also refer to the zoneadm(1M) man page for supported options to the zoneadm list command. For zone configuration procedures, see Chapter 18, Planning and Configuring Non-Global Zones (Tasks) and the zonecfg(1M) man page. Zone states are described in Non-Global Zone State Model.

If you plan to produce Solaris auditing records for zones, read Using Solaris Auditing in Zones before you install non-global zones.

Zone Construction

This section applies to initial zone construction, and not to the cloning of existing zones.

After you have configured a non-global zone, you should verify that the zone can be installed safely on your system's configuration. You can then install the zone. The files needed for the zone's root file system are installed by the system under the zone's root path.

A non-global zone is installed with the limited networking configuration (generic_limited_net.xml). Network configuration types are described in Chapter 15, "Managing Services (Tasks)," in System Administration Guide: Basic Administration. The zone administrator can switch the zone to the open, traditional networking configuration (generic_open.xml) by using the netservices command. Specific services can be enabled or disabled by using SMF commands. For more information, see Switching the Non-Global Zone to a Different Networking Service Configuration.

A successfully installed zone is ready for initial login and booting.

The method used to initially install packages in a Solaris installation is also the method used to populate a non-global zone.

The global zone must contain all the data necessary to populate a non-global zone. Populating a zone includes creating directories, copying files, and providing configuration information.

Only the information or data that was created in the global zone from packages is used to populate the zone from the global zone. For more information, see the pkgparam(1) and pkginfo(4) man pages.

Data from the following are not referenced or copied when a zone is installed:

Non-installed packages
Patches
Data on CDs and DVDs
Network installation images
Any prototype or other instance of a zone

In addition, the following types of information, if present in the global zone, are not copied into a zone that is being installed:

New or changed users in the /etc/passwd file
New or changed groups in the /etc/group file
Configurations for networking services such as DHCP address assignment
Customizations for networking services such as UUCP or sendmail
Configurations for network services such as naming services
New or changed crontab, printer, and mail files
System log, message, and accounting files