Zones

OpenSolaris Zones

Zones are an operating system abstraction for partitioning systems, allowing multiple applications to run in isolation from each other on the same physical hardware. This isolation prevents processes running within a zone from monitoring or affecting processes running in other zones, seeing each other's data, or manipulating the underlying hardware. Zones also provide an abstraction layer that separates applications from physical attributes of the machine on which they are deployed, such as physical device paths and network interface names.

This community is the home base for the Zones community: Users, application developers, folks who want to contribute to the zones infrastructure itself, and those developing management solutions.

Getting Started

• Read the ZONES FAQ!
• Lots of useful stuff at the BigAdmin Zones Page.
• Dennis Clarke's article Get in the Zone
• Zone Examples from SolarisInternals.com
• Amy Rich's Spotlight on Solaris Zones
• John Beck announces Zones.

Solaris 10 Containers on OpenSolaris Demo

• A new screencast that demonstrates the configuration, installation, booting, and operation of a Solaris 10 Container on OpenSolaris is available here.
   Solaris 10 Containers are based on the lightweight Solaris Zones virtualization technology, and allow administrators to virtualize Solaris 10 operating system environments on OpenSolaris without the use of a hypervisor. Solaris 10 Containers technology is currently under development: See the Zones Roadmap to learn more.

Conference Papers

• Solaris Zones: Operating System Support for Consolidating Commercial Workloads. The USENIX 18th Large Installation System Administration Conference.
• Solaris Zones: Operating System Support for Server Consolidation. From The USENIX Third Virtual Machine Research & Technology Symposium.

Documentation

• Zones & Containers System Administration Guide
• Menno's Containers & Zones Blueprint
• Blueprint: Slicing and Dicing Servers: A Guide to Virtualization and Containment Technologies
• Backup, Restore, and Disaster Recovery on a System With Zones Installed
• Improved Resource Management project overview
• Roadmap: May 27, 2009
• solaris10 Branded Zone Developer Guide

Developing Applications

• Bringing Your Application Into the Zone

For OS Developers

• Zones RFEs & Bugs
• Project Documents 

Other Resources

• Softpanorama zones page
• Apache Software Foundation uses zones!
• The ZoneStats package by Bruno Bonfils lets you graphically monitor the zones on your system.