Tribblix - creating zones from images

One of the things I've done with Tribblix is try and hide some of the complexity around managing zones - rather than having to mess around with zonecfg and zoneadm and all that, just have one simple command that creates a zone correctly.

Tribblix also has the capability to drop an alternative illumos distribution into a zone - so called alien zones.

The OmniTribblix variant has LX zones, so you can run Linux in a zone.

Up to now, you've had to manually download the appropriate image, save it somewhere, and then install the zone from that image.

Wouldn't it be much easier to have Tribblix do that for you? Well, as of the m20.4 release, it can!

So, for example, OmniOS have images as zfs send streams available for download - the .zfs.bz2 files. So you can now build an OmniOS zone on Tribblix like so:

zap create-zone -z omnios -t alien -i 10.0.2.26 -I omnios:r151026

That's it.

And, if you're running OmniTribblix you could create an Ubuntu zone like so:

zap create-zone -z ubuntu -t lx -x 10.0.2.27 -I ubuntu

or, if you want Alpine (and this is really quick)

zap create-zone -z alpine -t lx -x 10.0.2.28 -I proxmox:alpine

The images are downloaded and cached, so creating subsequent zones will be much quicker.

It's a proof of concept at this point, and needs fleshing out a bit more to make it even more friendly, but it shows that it's possible and useful.