Solaris Zones is a software partitioning technology, which provides a means of virtualizing operating system services to create an isolated environment for running applications. This isolation prevents processes that are running in one zone from monitoring or affecting processes running in other zones.

 

VxVM volume usage within a non-global zone:
 

A volume device node can be exported for use in non-global zone using the "zonecfg adddevice" command.

The primary reasons for exporting a VxVM volume to a non-global zone are:
 

1. For databases that are running in a non-global zone and would like to use these volumes for doing I/O on raw devices (no filesystem is built on top of this volume).
 

2. For use with some filesystems like UFS. For VxFS usage within a non-global zone, see the notes below.

 

Caution:
 

Exporting raw volumes to non-global zones has implicit security risks. It is possible for the ZONE administrator to create malformed file systems that could later panic the system when a mount is attempted.

Directly writing to raw volumes, exported to non-global zones, and using utilities such as "dd" can lead to data corruption in certain scenarios.

 

VxFS File System usage within a non-global zone:

 

There are 3 supported ways to use VxFS filesystem from within the non-global zone:
 

1. LOFS: VxFS file systems that were previously created in the global zone can be made available in the non-global zone using a loopback file system mount.

This functionality is especially useful when the sole purpose of making the filesystem available in the non-global zone is to share access of this file system with one or more non-global zones.

 

2. Direct mount: Exclusive access of a VxFS file system can be delegated to a non-global zone by direct mounting the file system in the non-global zone.

The mount & umount operations can only be performed from the global zone.
No VxFS File System administration commands are available within the non-global zone.

For a VxFS File System built on a VxVM volume, since the mounting is done from the global zone, the volume doesn't have to be exported to the non-global zone.
 

global # mount -F vxfs /dev/vx/dsk/zonedg/vol01//vol01
 

3. VxFS File System can be added to a zone's configuration using command "zonecfg add fs" & the VxFS File System will be mounted during zone boot.

This method also utilizes the direct mount option discussed in method #2 above.

If the zone is shutdown unclean, the VxFS filesystem could be marked as dirty and would prevent the zone from booting up.

Manually run fsck and then boot the zone using "zoneadm -z boot".