Tag: virtual interfaces

“Old” Solaris approach: a zone with exclusive IP-stack requires a separate physical network interface.

“New” Solaris 11 (project Crossbow, beginning b105) approach: you have one physical interface and you do with it whatever you want. You can create a whole network within your single box and a single network card.

Here’s an example on how to migrate your existing zones with shared stack to “independent” zones.

Old configuration: one global zone (system name xeon), one non-global zone (dmz), one physical interface (e1000g0), two VLAN’s (1 and 10):

“Defrouters” are defined in the global zone. So, if the global zone has a defaultrouter set to 10.0.1.1, you will have this route in zone “dmz”. You can’t get rid of it and force the traffic to 10.0.0.1. Instead you will have two default routes in both zones.

Now, let’s have a look at the virtual interfaces (a part of the new concept).
Currently we do not have any:

Let’s create two virtual interfaces, each of them will belong to a separate VLAN. You can choose a name for a virtual interface and call it whatever (almost 😉 ) you want:

Now we have two virtual interfaces:

• dmz1 – VLAN 1
• dmz0 – VLAN 10

with randomly assigned MAC addresses. You can assign an arbitrary MAC address to a virtual interface or use a factory one. (see man dladm).

Reconfigure the zone:

Now, (re)boot your zone and configure the network interfaces and default routes as if they were on a standalone system.

Nice! I love Solaris …