My (b33) glassfish v2 build
is a bit long in the tooth
(the latest promoted build is b50).

It bundles a JVM, but the nightly builds don’t, so my first pre-upgrade step is to install a standalone 1.6 JVM.

a communal JVM

I’ll need a few zones for playing with glassfish clustering and they’ll all need JVMs. Ideally, we want a central copy in the global zone that is visible from all the local zones.
That way:

  • all zones use the same on-disk binaries, so the VM system can re-use text segments across your zones (and you save a bit of disk)
  • you centralize upgrades/patches in the global zone
  • a readonly JVM encourages (ok, forces) you to put things like SSL keys and libraries in your glassfish domain directory, where they should be.

neatly packaged

Originally, this ‘howto’ involved getting the tarball from the JEE page, installing it to a zfs filesystem and loopback mounting it into each zone read-only.

Today, I realized the Solaris packages for JDK 1.6 give us all the benefits of that with none of the hassle. They’ll install in the global zone and be visible (as part of /usr) in all local zones. I won’t even have to restart the zones.

Get JDK 6u1 from the Java SE download page
(the Solaris x86 packages – tar.Z on the ‘Download’ page) .

Extract it In the global zone and add the packages it contains:

vera # uncompress jdk-6u1-solaris-i586.tar.Z
vera # tar xf jdk-6u1-solaris-i586.tar
vera # yes | pkgadd -d . SUNW*

It’s now visible in all the zones:

vera # zlogin goldfish
goldfish # java -version
java version "1.6.0_01"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_01-b06)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.6.0_01-b06, mixed mode, sharing)

The only minor niggle is that the /usr/java symlink can’t be edited in the local zones, but it’s easy enough to set a PATH explicitly if you want a different JVM.