A Little History

Hello Friend,

Welcome to The Zone Manager blog. Some of my friends in the blogging realm have poked and prodded me over the past couple of years to make the plunge into the blogging realm. I have resisted because I know that blogging can take a tremendous amount of time that frankly I don't usually have to give. However, one of my passions is in the realm of virtualization and in particular Sun's container technology called zones. I intend to use this blog to share with you the nuggets that I learn along the way. So to my friend John Clingan as of this moment, I am no longer a non-blogging heathen. ;-)

Now for a historical perspective on the Zone Manager. I first gained a deep appreciation of zones during my days in the Solutions Deployment Engineering team at Sun. One of my roles on that team was to help setup the labs for our Software Summit conferences. We typically had 2 or 3 lab rooms that were equipped with between 20-40 computers. The computers were typically a light weight workstation or a laptop. Each lab room would have 3 to 4 different labs sessions per day where each session was regarding a completely different topic. So in order to set up the systems for their respective sessions, we had three options. We could jumpstart the servers with custom install scripts, jumpstart them with a FLAR image, or create a unique zone for each lab session. We tried each option for different conferences but eventually found the zone option to be the most flexible and least risk prone.

The problem with the custom scripted and FLAR jumpstart options was that we had to re-jump all 40-120 systems between each lab to properly configure the systems for the next lab. This process could take anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple of hours depending on the complexity of operations to be performed. And if something went wrong, you just didn't get to use the systems for that lab because there wasn't enough time to repeat the jump. You see we typically only had about 10-15 minutes between lab sessions. Eeek!!!

Once zones became available I and the members of my team started looking at how we might be able to create a zone (or set of zones) per lab. Then when it was time to start the next lab we just shutdown all the zones but the zone(s) necessary for the next lab. This turned out to be a much better strategy than our jumpstart centered strategies. However, we had to do a lot of custom scripting for setting up the zones and prepping them for each lab. I realized at that point that we needed a general purpose script for automating 80-90% of all zone creation and management. Thus the zonemgr script was birthed.

All work from that point until now has been an incremental process of refining and improving the zonemgr script to greatly simplify creation and management of zones. I hope that you will try out the zonemgr script for yourself. It is an open source project. So please feel free to contribute your ideas and code to the project for everyone's benefit.

In closing, I want to re-iterate that the purpose of this blog will be to share with you my thoughts on zones, the zonemgr script's evolution and practical ways to use it along the way.

Blessings to you and yours!

Brad