Zone roots are essentially directories with lots of files. In my practice I had no problem transferring them between UFS and ZFS as suited the deployment. Solaris CPIO is considered best for the task, since (unlike gtar) it guarantees handling and conversion of Solaris-specific FS attributes and ACLs, and (unlike Solaris tar) it can handle long paths of file and directory names.
This went both ways - usually upgrading from UFS to ZFS, however once on a VMWare-hosted Solaris we had a number of ZFS corruptions (due to ignored storage flush requests and occasional abrupt power outages) which could not be fixed in the field, so that particular system was reverted to UFS. In practice, you can also "convert" between whole- and sparse-root zones by copying from global (or wiping) the zones' /lib, /sbin, /usr and /platform directories, and modifying the zone's XML descriptor file (/etc/zones/*.xml in global zone). However, this would likely break some validity of packaging databases, but if your zones are tailored for a specific task like serving a Tomcat server, this may be an acceptable loss/limitation. Apparently, these procedures are not expected to be supported by Sun, but they do work. HTH, //Jim -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-code mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-code
