Recently there’s been a lot of news about OpenSolaris, more specifically in reference to the great progress made by virtualization technologies in it. In this article, I will exam some of these technologies, and compare them with the state of the art on other platforms.

Zones

OpenSolaris’ Zones is a mechanism that provides isolated environments with a subset of the host operating system’s privileges, allowing applications to run within the zone without any modifications (Xen is also capable of this). This makes zones useful for server consolidation, load balancing and much more.

GNU/Linux can be scary to a new user. After all, what if you mess up? What if you end up corrupting your hard drive so badly that you need to format it to get rid of GNU/Linux? The solution is to use virtualization technology. A virtual machine creates a virtual hard drive as well as a virtual computer, so you can install and run it from within another operating system. If you want to get rid of the virtualized (also known as the guest) operating system, just delete the virtual hard disk from the real (host) computer’s hard drive.

Introduction