Solaris Server Virtualization Technology
Virtualization technology is a key to transforming an IT organization's server, storage, and network devices into a shared, global pool of resources. This can help reduce space, power, and cooling requirements while simultaneously helping make datacenters more flexible and agile. The two server virtualization technologies discussed in this Sun BluePrints article – Solaris Containers and Logical Domains – are of particular importance because of the low overhead they impose on the host server platform.
Solaris Containers abstracts a single Solaris OS instance into multiple containers, giving the appearance of a dedicated OS instance to each container. Solaris Containers is an excellent virtualization technology when a number of applications can run on the same OS instance. Logical Domains are used to partition the server CPU and memory, abstracting the hardware itself to multiple guest operating systems. Logical Domains can be used to support multiple OS instances on the same server, and each Solaris OS instance can also support multiple containers. With the ability to use each of these technologies independently, or in conjunction, Sun customers have a powerful set of tools for server virtualization in their datacenters.
Check back tomorrow for a preview of what we will be doing in the area of virtualization with Sun xVM technology.