Solaris Zones

Zones provide a virtual operating system environment within a single physical instance of Solaris 10. Applications can run in an isolated and secure environment. This isolation prevents an application running in one zone from monitoring or affecting an application running in a different zone.

There are two types of zones, global and non-global. Think of a global zone as the server itself, the traditional view of a Solaris system as we all know it, whereas a non-global zone is created from the global zone and also managed by it. You can have up to 8,192 non-global zones on a single physical system, Applications running in a non-global zone are isolated from applications running in a different non-global zone, allowing multiple versions of the same application to run on the same physical server.

A zone is created using the zonecfg command. With this command you can do the following:

Create or delete a zone configuration
Add or remove resources in a configuration
Set the properties for a resource in the configuration
Query and verify a configuration
Commit (save) a configuration
Revert to a previous configuration
Exit from a zonecfg session