NASDEV started life as a relatively simple idea.

Build a system.

Not a commercial NAS appliance, not a turnkey server, and certainly not something designed to be replaced every few years. The objective was to build something myself, understand how it worked, and keep it running.

That was the beginning of NASDEV.

With Solaris Zones providing the ability to separate services, it would be tempting to think that everything on NASDEV should live inside a non-global Zone.

That isn't quite how I use them.

The Global Zone remains an important part of the architecture.

It is the foundation from which the other Zones are managed, and it is also where some of the underlying system functions belong.

Understanding why is important because the Global Zone isn't simply "another Zone".

It has a fundamentally different role.

One of the advantages of running NASDEV for many years is that eventually you encounter problems that you simply wouldn't find in a textbook.

Solaris Zones: Building Multiple Systems Inside One System

One of the features of Solaris that has had a major influence on the design of NASDEV is something called Zones.

At first glance, a Zone can look a little like a virtual machine.

It has its own filesystem environment, networking configuration, processes and services. From inside the Zone, it can feel very much like you are working with a separate server.

But there is an important difference.