Oracle Solaris Containers - Oracle Solaris 10 System Virtualization Essentials - page 170

Software packaging, deployment, and flexible file system assignments

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Resource management controls

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Resource usage reporting

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Network access

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Optional access to devices

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Centralized or localized patch management

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Management of Containers (e.g., configure, boot, halt, migrate)

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This chapter describes the most useful features that can be used with Containers.
Although a complete description of the use of all of these features is beyond the
scope of this topic, more details can be found at http://docs.sun.com . The next
few sections describe features and provide simple command-line examples of their
usage. Unless otherwise noted, these features are available in Solaris 10. Most of
them are also available in OpenSolaris, which also offers new features not found
in Solaris 10.
The command examples in this chapter use the prompt GZ# to indicate a com-
mand that must be entered by the root user in the global zone. The prompt zone1#
indicates that a command will be entered as the root user of the Container named
zone1 .

6.1 Feature Overview

The Containers feature set was introduced in the initial release of Solaris 10,
in 2005. The Containers implementation of operating system virtualization
(OSV) includes a rich set of capabilities. This section describes the features of
Containers and provides brief command-line examples demonstrating the use of
those features.
Containers are characterized by a high degree of isolation, with the separa-
tion between them enforced by a robust security boundary. They serve as the
underlying framework for the Solaris Trusted Extensions feature set. Trusted
Extensions have achieved the highest commonly recognized global security certi-
fication, which is a tribute to the robustness of the security boundary around each
Container.
The Solaris 10 documentation uses two different terms to refer to its OSV fea-
ture set: Containers and zones. Within the Oracle Solaris development commu-
nity, the word “zones” refers to the isolation and security features. A Container
is a zone that uses resource management features. However, making a distinction
between those two terms is rarely worth the effort. Indeed, most people use them