Solaris 8 Migration Assistant (Project Etude)

First of all, just a few words about the niche for this product. Many companies are rather conservative about their Solaris upgrades. Most systems are still running Solaris 8, if not something older. Quite often this is also dictated by third-party software dependencies – products which were bought and configured for Solaris 8, which are now so tightly integrated that there isn’t an easy way to migrated them into Solaris 10. Such systems are doomed for slow but very expensive death. Expensive, because with every year the hardware support for servers capable of running Solaris 8 raises again and again.
That’s where the Solaris 8 zones come in. It’s very easy, really: you create a flar-copy fo your existing physical server under Solaris 8, then create a Solaris 8 zone, import your flar-archive and get a virtual copy of your Solaris 8 environment, with all your processes, programs and startup scripts.
To make things easier, it’s even possible to configure your hostid in Solaris 8 zone to match the one of the physical Solaris 8 system, this way no programs running in the zone will even guess that they’ve been virtualized.
Who knows, maybe I’ll tell you more about this technology some other day, but for now – just the simplest list of actions and commands for your S8MA proof of concept.
Preparation: Solaris 10u4 server an S8MA packages
1. Find and prepare a sparc box with Solaris 10u4. It is important to have the latest Solaris 10 update. Preparations are usually limited to applying a kernel patch, 127111-01 in my case.
2. Download the Solaris 8 Migration Assitant (current version is 1.0) from this location: Solaris 8 Migration Assistant. The 3 packages in archive are dead easy to install using standard pkgadd.
Here are the packages you’ll get:
SUNWs8brandr Solaris 8 Migration Assistant: solaris8 brand support (Root)
SUNWs8brandu Solaris 8 Migration Assistant: solaris8 brand support (Usr)
SUNWs8p2v Solaris 8 p2v Tool
Preparation: Solaris 10u4 server an S8MA packages
1. Find and prepare a sparc box with Solaris 10u4. It is important to have the latest Solaris 10 update. Preparations are usually limited to applying a kernel patch, 127111-01 in my case.
2. Download the Solaris 8 Migration Assitant (current version is 1.0) from this location: Solaris 8 Migration Assistant. The 3 packages in archive are dead easy to install using standard pkgadd.
Here are the packages you’ll get:
SUNWs8brandr Solaris 8 Migration Assistant: solaris8 brand support (Root)
SUNWs8brandu Solaris 8 Migration Assistant: solaris8 brand support (Usr)
SUNWs8p2v Solaris 8 p2v Tool