Zones Overview

The Oracle Solaris Zones partitioning technology is used to virtualize operating system services and provide an isolated and secure environment for running applications. A zone is a virtualized operating system environment created within a single instance of the Oracle Solaris operating system. 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 running with superuser credentials cannot view or affect activity in other zones. With Oracle Solaris Zones, you can maintain the one-application-per-server deployment model while simultaneously sharing hardware resources.

A zone also provides an abstract layer that separates applications from the physical attributes of the machine on which they are deployed. Examples of these attributes include physical device paths.

Zones can be used on any machine that is running the Oracle Solaris 10 or later Oracle Solaris release. 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, and the size of the system.

The zone root file system model supported on this release is the whole root zone. This model provides the maximum configurability. All of the required system software and any additional packages are installed into the private file systems of the zone.

These concepts are discussed in Chapter 17, Planning and Configuring Non-Global Zones (Tasks).