Solaris Containers
| Original author(s) | Sun Microsystems |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | illumos and Oracle |
| Initial release | January 2005 |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Oracle Solaris |
| Platform | SPARC, x86 |
| Available in | English |
| Type | OS-level virtualization |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | oracle |
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.
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.
Later, there was a gradual move such that Solaris Containers specifically referred to non-global zones, with or without additional Resource Management. Zones hosted by a global zone are known as "non-global zones" but are sometimes just called "zones". The term "local zone" is specifically discouraged, since in this usage "local" is not an antonym of "global". The global zone has visibility of all resource on the system, whether these are associated with the global zone or a non-global zone. Unless otherwise noted, "zone" will refer to non-global zones in this article.
To simplify terminology, Oracle dropped the use of the term Container in Solaris 11, and has reverted to use of the term Solaris Zone irrespective of the use of resource management controls.
Each zone has its own node name, access to virtual or physical network interfaces, and storage assigned to it; there is no requirement for a zone to have any minimum amount of dedicated hardware other than the disk storage necessary for its unique configuration. Specifically, it does not require a dedicated CPU, memory, physical network interface or HBA, although any of these can be allocated specifically to one zone.
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