OpenSolaris™ Bible

Chapter 19. Zones

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Introduction to Zones

• Getting started with Zones

• Advanced Zones configuration

• Advanced zoneadm features

• Ongoing Zones administration

• Limitations to Zones

• Branded Zones

As described in Chapter 17, zones are the operating system-level virtualization capability provided by OpenSolaris. This chapter focuses on zones and explains how resource management features, covered in Chapter 18, are used in conjunction with them. The combination of zones and resource management is called containers.

Introduction to Zones

The OpenSolaris zones capability is used to create a virtualized environment for running software in a secure and isolated way. Within the zone, it appears to users and applications that they are running on a standalone system. Users and processes outside of the zone cannot be seen or affected, there are no name conflicts on files or ports, and the behavior of software within the zone is contained to that zone. Because there are no name conflicts across zones, each zone has a unique user-ID namespace and its own root user. Administration within the zone is delegated to that zone's root user, who can configure and manage the zone almost as he or she sees fit. The various limitations are discussed in this chapter.

Although each zone appears as a standalone operating system from inside the zone, in reality there is a single instance of an OpenSolaris kernel running on the hardware. This kernel is inherently aware of zones and actively manages the containment ...