Zones and the Service Management Facility
The Oracle Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF) framework manages system and application services. SMF manages critical system services essential to the working operation of the system and also manages application services such as a database or web server. SMF improves the availability of a system by ensuring that essential system and application services run continuously, even in the event of a hardware or software failure.
The zones SMF service has mechanisms for prioritizing zones booting order, setting a threshold for the number of zones booting in parallel, and providing integration with Fault Management Architecture (FMA).