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Posts in Virtualization
Adding a file system to a running zone
I needed to add a second file system to one of my Solaris 10 zones this morning, and needed to do so without rebooting the zone. Since the global zone uses loopback mounts to present file systems to zones, adding a new file system was as easy as loopback mounting the file system into the zone's file system: Once the file system was mounted, I added it to the zone configuration and then verified it was mounted: Now to update my ASM disk group to use the storage.
$ read more →Patching zones when they are attached to hosts
I recently patched one of my Solaris 10 hosts, and decided to test out the zone update on attach functionality that is now part of Solaris 10 update 6. The update on attach feature allows detached zones to get patched when they are attached to a host, which can be rather handy if you are moving zones around your infrastructure. To test this functionality, I first detached a zone from the host I was going to patch: Once the zone was detached, I applied the latest Solaris patch bundle and rebooted the server. When the system came back up, I tried to attach the zone: As you can see in the above output, the zone refused to attach because the zone patch database differed from the global zone patch database…
$ read more →Patching zones in parallel
While catching up on some of my favorite blogs, I came across a post pertaining to parallel zone patching by Jeff Victor. In his write up, Jeff discussed a couple of methods for decreasing the time it takes to patch a host with one more more zones. Of the methods listed, the "Zones Parallel patch" feature caught my eye: "Sun has developed an enhancement to the Solaris patching tools which is intended to significantly decrease the elapsed time of patching. It is currently being tested at a small number of sites…
$ read more →Changing the zone path of a pre-existing zone
So, the hostname of one of our zones changed, and we create ZFS file systems for the zones using / Easy enough of a fix... So now that we've changed the zone name, I also wanted to update the ZFS file system to reflect the new hostname... Easy enough. Lets boot the zone…
$ read more →Building clusters with shared disk using VMWare server 2.0
I have a couple of lab machines that are running VMWare server 2.X under 64-bit CentOS 5.2. VMWare server has a cool feature where you can create "clusters in a box." The cluster in a box feature allows you to share a virtual disk between more than one virtual machine, and since it support SCSI persistent reservations, you can truly simulate a real cluster. I have used this to deploy Oracle RAC, Solaris Cluster and Redhat Cluster server in my lab environment. Based on the cluster in a box documentation on the VMWare website, sharing a disk between multiple nodes can be achieved by creating a virtual disk, and then importing that disk into each virtual machine…
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