An image is a location where IPS packages can be installed and where other IPS operations can be performed.
A boot environment (BE) is a bootable instance of an image. You can maintain multiple BEs on a physical or virtual system, and each BE can have different software versions installed, including different operating system versions. When you boot your system, you have the option to boot into any of the BEs on the system. A new BE can be created automatically as a result of package operations. Whether a new BE is created automatically depends on image policy as described in Boot Environment Policy Image Properties. You can also explicitly create a new BE by specifying options described in Boot Environment Options. See Creating and Administering Oracle Solaris 11.2 Boot Environments for information about how to use the beadm command to create a new BE.
Packages can only be installed into file systems that are part of a BE. For example, on a default Oracle Solaris 11 installation, only datasets under rpool/ROOT/BEname/ are supported for package operations.
An Oracle Solaris Zone is another example of an image. A non-global zone is a virtualized operating system environment created within an instance of the Oracle Solaris operating system called the global zone. The global zone is the parent image, and non-global zones within that global zone are child images of that global zone. In IPS command output, non-global zones are sometimes called linked images because they are linked to their parent global zone image.
IPS commands executed in a global zone can affect non-global zones as described in Working with Non-Global Zones. IPS commands executed in a global zone do not affect kernel zones (solaris-kz branded zones) or Oracle Solaris 10 zones (solaris10 branded zones). In this guide, “non-global zone” means a solaris branded Oracle Solaris 11 non-global zone. See Introduction to Oracle Solaris Zones for information about zones.