Zone Types

Two types of zone exist: global and non-global.

A global zone contains a fully functional installation of the Solaris OS that is bootable by the system hardware. An installation of the Solaris OS becomes the global zone when it is booted by the system hardware. Only one global zone runs on a system. The global zone administrator creates non-global zones with zonecfg(1M) and zoneadm(1M). The global zone controls the installation, maintenance, operation, and destruction of all non-global zones.

The Solaris Zones feature provides service virtualization and namespace isolation to processes running in a non-global zone. Processes in a non-global zone are isolated from processes in other zones. This isolation prevents processes running in a non-global zone from monitoring or affecting processes running in other zones. Even processes running with super user credentials in a non-global zone cannot view or affect activity in other zones.

A zone also provides an abstract layer separating applications from the physical attributes of the machine on which they are deployed. Examples of these attributes include physical device paths and network interface names.

Zones can be used on any machine that is supported on the Solaris 10 release. The upper limit for the number of zones on a single physical server is 8192. The number of zones that can effectively be hosted on a single physical server is dependent upon the total resource requirements of applications running in all of the zones combined.