The old net resource for zones has been somewhat deprecated, in favor of a new name, anet. Technically, it stands for Automated Network Interface, but it also adds a few new capabilities that could have been added to the regular net resource but were not.

Zones now, by default, have a network type of exclusive rather than shared. This may be a little misleading to Solaris 10 admins since that previously implied an entire physical network interface would be dedicated to the zone. Happily, this is no longer required.

Solaris 11 zones make use of the new Virtual Network Interface, aka VNIC. It is now standard procedure for a zone to have its own VNIC, which is in some ways similar to the concept of a virtual interface under VMware or VirtualBox. The VNIC device usually has its own automatically generated Ethernet address and so can be a fully functional direct member of your network, including the use of DHCP, VLAN tagging, and anything else...