Oracle Solaris Containers - Oracle Solaris 10 System Virtualization Essentials - page 171

interchangeably. In this topic, we use the word “Containers” exclusively, even if
resource management features are not in use.
The examples shown here were taken from a Solaris 10 10/09 system. Some
of the features described in this section—for example, CPU caps—did not exist
in early updates to Solaris 10. To determine feature availability of a particular
Solaris 10 update, see the “What's New” document for that update at http://
docs.sun.com/app/docs/prod/solaris.10 .
Later in this chapter, the section “Network Virtualization in OpenSolaris,” ap-
plies only to OpenSolaris 2009.06 and newer releases.

6.1.1 Basic Model
When you install Oracle Solaris 10 on a system, the original operating environ-
ment—a traditional UNIX-like system—is also called the global zone . A sufficiently
privileged user running in the global zone can create Containers but they cannot
be nested: A Container cannot contain other Containers, as shown in Figure 6.1.

Figure 6.1 Structure of an Oracle Solaris System with Containers

In a system with Containers, the global zone is usually the platform manage-
ment area with the sole purpose of managing Containers and the system's hard-
ware and software resources. This is similar to the control domain of hypervisor-
based system, for two reasons:

The global zone requires resources to operate, such as CPU cycles and RAM.
If an application running in the global zone consumes too much of a resource

■