Solaris Containers

Solaris Containers (including Solaris Zones) is an implementation of operating system-level virtualization technology for x86 and SPARC systems, first released publicly in February 2004 in build 51 beta of Solaris 10, and subsequently in the first full release of Solaris 10, 2005. It is present in illumos (formerly OpenSolaris) distributions, such as OpenIndiana, SmartOS and OmniOS, as well as in the official Oracle Solaris 11 release.

A Solaris Container is the combination of system resource controls and the boundary separation provided by zones. Zones act as completely isolated virtual servers within a single operating system instance. By consolidating multiple sets of application services onto one system and by placing each into isolated virtual server containers, system administrators can reduce cost and provide most of the same protections of separate machines on a single machine.

Terminology

The name of this technology changed during development and the pre-launch public events. Before the launch of Solaris Zones in 2005, a Solaris Container was any type of workload constrained by Solaris resource management features. The latter had been a separate software package in earlier history. By 2007 the term Solaris Containers came to mean a Solaris Zone combined with resource management controls.