Upcoming Solaris Features: ...

The Virtualisation part

This part is heavily inspired by this blog entry of Ben Rockwood, but he ommited some parts in the course of his article to make a full walk-through out of it, so i extended it a little bit.

Normally a network consists out of switches and networking cards, server and router . It´s easy to replicate this in a single system. Networking cards can be simulated by VNICS, switches are called etherstubs in the namespace of Crossbow. Server can be simulated by zones of course, and as router are not much more than special-purpose servers, we could simulate them by a zone as well.

A simple network

Let us simulate a simple network at first. Just two servers and a router:


At first we create two virtual switches. They are called etherstub0 and etherstub1

# dladm create-etherstub etherstub0
# dladm create-etherstub etherstub1

Okay, now we create virtual nics that are bound to the virtual switch etherstub0. These virtual nics are called vnic1 and vnic0.

# dladm create-vnic -l etherstub0 vnic1
# dladm create-vnic -l etherstub0 vnic2

Now we do the same with our second virtual switch:

# dladm create-vnic -l etherstub1 vnic3
# dladm create-vnic -l etherstub1 vnic4

Okay, let´s look up the configuratio of our network.

# dladm showlink
LINK        CLASS    MTU    STATE    OVER
ni0         phys     1500   unknown  --
etherstub0  etherstub 9000  unknown  --
etherstub1  etherstub 9000  unknown  --
vnic1       vnic     9000   up       etherstub0
vnic2       vnic     9000   up       etherstub0
vnic3       vnic     9000   up       etherstub1
vnic4       vnic     9000   up       etherstub1
vnic5       vnic     1500   up       ni0

Yes, that´s all ... but what can we do with it? For example simulating a complete network in your system. Let´s create a network with two networks, a router with a firewall and nat and a server in each of the network. Obviously we will use zones for this.

A template zone

At first we create a template zone. This zone is just used for speeding up the creation of other zones. To enable zone creation based on ZFS snapshots, we have to create a filesystem for our zones and mount it at a nice position in your filesystem:

# zfs create rpool/zones
# zfs set compression=on rpool/zones
# zfs set mountpoint=/zones rpool/zones

Now we prepare a command file for the zone creation. The pretty much the standard for a sparse root zone. We don´t configure any network interfaces, as we never boot or use this zone. It´s just a template as the name alreay states. So at first we create a file called template in a working directory. All the following steps assume that you are in this directory as i won´t use absolute paths.

create -b
set zonepath=/zones/template
set ip-type=exclusive
set autoboot=false
add inherit-pkg-dir
set dir=/lib
end
add inherit-pkg-dir
set dir=/platform
end
add inherit-pkg-dir
set dir=/sbin
end
add inherit-pkg-dir
set dir=/usr
end
add inherit-pkg-dir
set dir=/opt
end
commit

Now we create the zone. Depending on your test equipment this will take some times.

# zonecfg -z template -f template
# zoneadm -z template install
A ZFS file system has been created for this zone.
Preparing to install zone