Solaris Containers (Zones)
Zones provide a lightweight mechanism for separating different applications running within the same Solaris instance. A Solaris instance may be running bare-metal on the server, or within an ldom.
Administrators who are willing to invest the time and resources to gain experience with zones may discover new, more efficient ways of doing things. These new methods don't fit the old model of managing separate Solaris instances servers, but can make ongoing administration easier and faster.
As with anything in Solaris, there are a many ways to configure zones. This section will guide you through some of the important design decisions.
See also:
- Solution: Solaris SPARC Consolidation for how Solid Systems Australia can help you with your SPARC deployment
- SPARC T-Series - LDoms vs Zones for a comparison of zones and ldoms in a Solaris SPARC environment
- Details
- Written by Tom Shaw
- Parent Category: Knowledge Base
- Category: Solaris Containers (Zones)
The ZFS filesystem built in to Solaris is an amazing piece of technology: combining the functionality of a volume manager and a filesystem, it delivers a pooled storage model with built in snapshots, clones, block-level compression, and clever use of SSDs to accelerate read and write performance. When configured correctly, it complements a zones environment very well.
- Details
- Written by Tom Shaw
- Parent Category: Knowledge Base
- Category: Solaris Containers (Zones)
In Solaris 10, a major design choice is whether to use sparse root zones or full root zones. Remember, a zone is a lightweight virtual server running within a shared Solaris instance.
With sparse root zones, the standard Solaris software packages are shared read-only from the global zone into the non-global zones. With whole root zones, the same software packages are instead copied into the non-global zones.
Note: In Solaris 11, sparse root zones are no longer available -- the benefits are now provided by ZFS and the new Image Packaging System.