MultiNICB resource in a Zone environment

[AV-IT]

Solaris 10 Zones with SFHA 5.1 SP1 / VCS 5.1. SP1 RP1

Having lots of VLANs using IPMP configured within zones. One VLAN per local zone. Each VLAN is configured locally in a zone. I am trying to migrate this setup to a VCS environment. At the moment all the network is configured with interfaces configured exclusively for zones and in each local zone using /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname.<interface> files. Need some ideas how to take those under VCS control.

To add to the above is a fact that we are running GCO that replicates all these zones (including root) over to another site. Which means that the /etc/hosts and inteffaces config files mentioned above are replicated across to a different subnet and become completely irrelevant after a GCO switchover.

Suggestons? Thanks!

[mikebounds · Accepted solution]

Exclusive IPs for Zones were not supported in 5.1.  In 5.1SP1, there is a ExclusiveIPZone attribute on the NIC agent, but not on the MultiNICB agent, so therefore I don't think you can use Exclusive Zone IPs with IPMP in VCS, but you may want to clarify the situation with Symantec Support.

I had a customer who wanted to do the same in 5.1, so this is how I worked round this:

I configured IPMP in the global zone, but I used 0.0.0.0 address for base and test address so that these interfaces could not be used in the global zone.  For this to work you have to set the IgnoreLinkStatus attibute on the MultiNICB resources to 0.  I then configured IPMultiNICB resources as normal to bring up virtual IPs in the local zone and also configured an IPMultiNICB resource for the host IP of the zone.

Note you cannot add a default route from the local zone (or add from the global zone, specifying you want route in a specific local zone, so you have to just add default route in global zone and the local zone will inherit the route.  So in the global zone you will see multiple default routes which is why you must use 0.0.0.0 address's in the global zone, otherwise you would have multiple default routes which could be used.

Mike

[AV-IT]

Thanks Mike! Interesting idea! Unfortunately this is a nn-go in our environmrent due to restrictions on default routing and exclusive IP for multiple zones.