Hello,

I have been using sparc workstations :SUNW,Ultra-5_10

Total 4 such machines. Users use it for mpich programming and all run solaris 8

but I always have hard time maintaining these machines. Authentication for these machines work from solaris 10 using NIS and there are nfs mounts on each work station.

I am wondering if it would be possible to move these 4 workstations on solaris 10 on V240 by using solaris containers.

V240 is having 8GB of memory. I am wondering if this is possible?

Please guide me , thanks

It looks doable by using Solaris 8 containers that allows "cloning" the existing servers.

Solaris Containers

Correct, sun has a nice documentation as always. Thank you.

I will be really happy, if someone who has tried this before shares their experience..

What type of maintenance issues do you have?

Moving them into a container might not resolve your issues, instead making your environment more complex...

I do not want to see " can't open boot device" "disk error" kind of messages. I do not want these work stations shock me suddenly going offline due to any hardware failure. it has been happening regularly with these workstations such type of things..in case of such issues every time I have to take out HDD and try it in different machines, if that does not help then mirror another disk put it in these workstations...my space in the room going waste..these machines need keyboard connected to boot them..i do not have spare ones if something goes wrong with existing ones...more important is system is going down anytime causing loss of work to logged in users...

always these systems go out of swap space, there is limited disk space, /var always around 100%, can't patch them, some days back , it was not hard disk issue but I had to move hard disk to other machine , looks like bad memory on original machine...so such issues...

i don't think i should wait for this hardware to die. Also buying 4 separate sparc machines would be costly. what better way is there than using containers ?

Containers will help to address this type of issue.

"maintenance" can be anything - user issues, environment issues, etc. These issues are not as easily addressed with Containers.

Download the "Solaris 8 Containers 1.0 for Solaris 10 OS, SPARC". Also, grab " Example Solaris 8 System Image" so that you can experiment.

Give it a try!

can these development boxes be solaris 10 or do they have to solaris 8?