As an aspect of platform portability, Unified Archives enable image transforms between physical and virtual machines as well as global and non-global zones. Because these transforms are committed during deployment, the transform is determined by the deployed system type.
The most significant requirement for platform compatibility is the same instruction set architecture. Beyond this, any deployment target is supported for an archive, which enables many migration paths for legacy systems. For example, legacy hardware deployments may be archived and deployed as virtual machine instances on new hardware. Similarly, non-global Oracle Solaris Zones may be archived and deployed as Oracle Solaris Kernel Zones.
There are some systems that can not be transformed, such as:
Oracle Solaris 10 brand zones may not be transformed into any other system type. They may only be archived and deployed as an identical Solaris 10 brand zone instance.
Trusted Extensions or labeled zone archives can not be transformed. They can be deployed to a global zone context, such as a Logical Domain.