zfs code - Sep 2010 - can ufs zones and zfs zones coexist on a single global zone

Looking at migrating zones built on an M8000 and M5000 to a new M9000. On the
M9000 we started building new deployments using ZFS. The environments on the
M8/M5 are UFS. these are whole root zones. they will use global zone resources.

Can this be done? Or would a ZFS migration be needed? 

thank you,
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Zone roots are essentially directories with lots of files. In my practice I had
no problem transferring them between UFS and ZFS as suited the deployment.
Solaris CPIO is considered best for the task, since (unlike gtar) it guarantees
handling and conversion of Solaris-specific FS attributes and ACLs, and (unlike
Solaris tar) it can handle long paths of file and directory names.

This went both ways - usually upgrading from UFS to ZFS, however once on a
VMWare-hosted Solaris we had a number of ZFS corruptions (due to ignored storage
flush requests and occasional abrupt power outages) which could not be fixed in
the field, so that particular system was reverted to UFS.

In practice, you can also "convert" between whole- and sparse-root
zones by copying from global (or wiping) the zones'' /lib, /sbin, /usr
and /platform directories, and modifying the zone''s XML descriptor file
(/etc/zones/*.xml in global zone). However, this would likely break some
validity of packaging databases, but if your zones are tailored for a specific
task like serving a Tomcat server, this may be an acceptable loss/limitation.

Apparently, these procedures are not expected to be supported by Sun, but they
do work.

HTH,
//Jim
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