NAME

illumos — zone brand for running an independant illumos distribution

DESCRIPTION

An illumos branded zone uses the brands(7) framework to provide an environment for running a generic illumos system.

Subject to the constraints imposed by the shared kernel, it can be used to run a foreign version of OmniOS userland or even a different illumos distribution.

The zone must be installed using one of: an absolute pathname of a zfs(8) send stream of a dataset which contains an image of the software to be run in the zone, a name of a zfs(8) dataset to be cloned or snapshot to be promoted, or the absolute pathname of a tar(1) file or gzipped tar file.

Examples:

zoneadm -z myzone install -x nodataset
zoneadm -z myzone install -s /path/to/sendstream.zfs
zoneadm -z myzone install -s name/of/dataset-to-clone
zoneadm -z myzone install -s name/of/snapshot-to@promote
zoneadm -z myzone install -t /path/to/tarball.tgz

CONFIGURATION

Persistent network configuration (including DNS resolver information) can be configured using zonecfg(8). An example illumos zone configured with VNIC "vnic0" using a static IP address is below:

create -t illumos
set zonepath=/zones/testzone
set autoboot=true
add net
    set physical=vnic0
    set allowed-address=192.168.0.2/24
    set defrouter=192.168.0.1
    set global-nic=auto
end
add attr
    set name=dns-domain
    set type=string
    set value=example.com
end
add attr
    set name=resolvers
    set type=string
    set value=192.168.12.1,192.168.13.1
end

LIMITATIONS

As there is only the single illumos kernel running on the system, not all foreign distributions will run correctly. If necessary, a full virtual machine can be used instead of an illumos branded zone.

SEE ALSO

mdb(1), proc(1), brands(7), privileges(7), resource_controls(7), zones(7), dtrace(8), zfs(8), zoneadm(8), zonecfg(8)