OpenSolaris

The hostid is defined as the hardware serial number of the running machine and is unique for each host. All zones on that host (global and all non-global zones) share the same hostid as they are sharing the same kernel and the same hardware.

Unfortunatly several third party software solutions use the hostid for licence checking (e.g. flexlm which is also used by some Sun products). This causes problems as the same hostid suddenly appears from multiple originating instances (non-global zones in this case). The correct fix would be to change the licencing software to use the zone uuid instead of the hostid but customer has no control over these legacy applications.

It would be helpful to (optionally?) make the hostid unique per zone. This would ease adoption of the zones feature. Right now some software can't be used inside non-global zones due to this restriction of equal hostids for each non-global zone. This particular customer reports problems with BMC Remedy but other applications are most likely affected, too.

Run destructive dtrace script to intercept the sysinfo(SI_HW_SERIAL) call and return manually configured hostids for each zone.
Alternatively, use an LD_PRELOAD that intercepts sysinfo().

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