Cloning FreeBSD Jails with ZFS as a method for provisioning Oracle 11g R2

A requirement more and more pressing in the current data centers is the ability to deploy applications and services quickly, almost immediately.

It is becoming increasingly frequent that the system administrators and DBAs maintain different versions of the same service or application to be used as production environment, testing, development, reporting.

In this post I will show, as the combination of ZFS and FreeBSD Jails can simplify these tasks to the point that are almost trivial.

Install Debian GNU/Linux on a FreeBSD Jail with ZFS

Continuing with the process of configuring a  newly installed FreeBSD system to get a production environment with hosted services in Jails. 

We will continue working with Debian and Linux-based distributions that provide the right Userland to meet the goal, not fully achieved, of executing  Linux binaries on FreeBSD Jail.

Install Debian GNU/kFreeBSD on a FreeBSD Jail with ZFS

Once we have installed and updated a FreeBSD 9 system, the next step is to provide it with apps to make it a useful system.

In recent years, I have been working on Solaris 10 systems, where services had in production were encapsulated in Solaris Containers. Given my recent interest in FreeBSD seems natural to attempt to play a similar execution environment, which gave me such good results in the past. 

Moreover, it seems interesting the possibility to include the ability to run Linux applications and having a jail specifically intended for that purpose. 

In this case, instead of installing a Jail with the  FreeBSD native  userland, we will install Debian GNU/kFreeBSD that provides an alternative userland for FreeBSD 9.