Introduction to Zones Partitioning

The Solaris Zones partitioning technology is used to virtualize operating system services and to provide an isolated and secure environment for running applications. A zone is a virtualized operating system environment that is created within a single instance of the Solaris Operating System (OS). When you create a zone, you produce an application execution environment in which processes are isolated from the rest of the system. This isolation prevents processes that are running in one zone from monitoring or affecting processes that are running in other zones. Even a process that is running with superuser credentials cannot view or affect activity in other zones.

Zones can be used on any machine that is running the Solaris 10 OS. The total resource requirements of the application software running in all of the zones determines how many zones a single system can host effectively. For more information about Solaris Zones, see Part II, Zones, in System Administration Guide: Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Solaris Zones.