OCA Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration Exam Guide (Exam 1Z0-821)

Understanding Solaris Zones

Let’s cut right to it: What is a Solaris Zone? If I’m talking loosely, I’d say it’s a special kind of project that runs in its own boot environment (BE). That is, it runs its own operating system and its own file systems. It maintains its own process scheduler, its own service repository, and it can support its own network services. There are a few subtler elements as well that can make it virtually separate from the machine-level operating system that supports it. From now on, I’ll refer to this machine-level environment as the global zone.

A zone takes the isolation concept a step further by partitioning its operations from all other processes running on the same machine, whether those processes run in the global ...