Migrating a jail

Thick iocage jails can be safely migrated between FreeBSD hosts using ZFS Send/Recv over SSH.

In the following example:

• src$ is the original host
• dst$ is the destination host
• ‘myapp’ is the name of my jail to migrate
• Everything is done with root privileges

Stopping processes

Stop the jail and any other ZFS replication processes.

src$ iocage stop myapp

src$ service zrepl stop

dst$ service zrepl stop

Create a snapshot

src$ zfs snapshot -r zroot/iocage/jails/myapp@migration

Send the snapshot

src$ zfs send -R zroot/iocage/jails/myapp@migration | ssh root@dst 'zfs recv -F -v zroot/iocage/jails/myapp'

Testing

Check that the jail exists and that it can be started.

dst$ iocage list

dst$ iocage start myapp