Zones Overview

A Solaris 10 feature, zones provide an isolated and secure environment for running applications. Zones give you a way to create virtualized operating system environments within an instance of Solaris. Zones allow one or more processes to run in isolation from other processes on the system. For example, a process that runs in a zone can send signals only to other processes in the same zone, regardless of user ID and other credential information. If an error occurs, it affects only the processes that run within the zone.

Each zone can have its own IP address, file system, unique root user name and password file, and name server.

Every Solaris 10 system contains a global zone. The global zone is the default zone for the system and is used for system-wide administration. The global zone cannot be configured, installed, or uninstalled.

The upper limit for the number of zones on a system is 8192. The number of zones that can be effectively hosted on a single system is determined by the total resource requirements of the application software running in all of the zones.

Container Manager enables you to create, delete, modify, copy, halt and reboot non-global zones. Container Manager also can discover existing zones, detect zone changes, monitor and archive a zone's CPU, memory and network utilization, and generate zone up or zone down alarms.

You must be a zone administrator to manage (create, modify, copy, delete, boot, shut down) non-global zones. The zone administrators are specified while setting up the Solaris Container Manager software.

For more information about zones, see Chapter 16, Introduction to Solaris Zones, in System Administration Guide: Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Solaris Zones.