Howto: Mount New File System To Running Solaris 10 Zone

I recently came across the need to mount a new file system to a Solaris 10 non-global zone without rebooting the actual zone. There are other ways to accomplish this same task but most of the solutions I've found required rebooting the non-global zone. Unfortunately, we could not take an outage by rebooting the non-global zone yet the file system needed to be added to the zone.

The method below describes a way in which you can mount a new file system (UFS) to a running Solaris 10 zone without the need of a reboot.

  • All commands need to be run from the global zone as the root user unless otherwise specified.
  • A Solaris 10 host with at least one running non-global zone.
  • You can not unmount the file system from the non-global zone. Some say this is a benefit ;-)

Lets get started!

If you would like to make this permanent, you will need to add it to the /etc/vfstab in the global zone.