Tech: Installing and cloning SAP inside Sun Solaris Containers

Mark Wondratschek, member of SAP’s High Availability Initiative, created a great 6-parts how-to for installing SAP inside a Sun Solaris 10 zone and cloning it inside other zones for high availability purposes:

This is the first part of a blogger series describing how to easily create runable shadow copies of productive systems using Sun Solaris 10 native OS virtualization functionalities (Solaris Zones).
These shadow systems can be used for applying updates, patches or similar tasks which would result in a downtime of the productive system usually.
After the desired task was performed successfully the shadow systems can be switched with the productive systems. This way the planned downtime of the productive system landscape can be reduced dramatically.

In this part you will get a short overview about the general concepts. The following parts provide a step-by-step approach based on a SAP NetWeaver 2004s SR1 system (usage type EP) running on Solaris 10 operating system…

Worth to read both Installing SAP systems in Solaris 10 Zones and Creating SAP system clones using Solaris 10 virtualization concepts.