Oracle Solaris 11 Zones is a great framework that virtualizes and consolidates a system environment where there are many applications and physical machines running Oracle Solaris. Using a rough comparison, Oracle Solaris 11 zone is similar to other virtualization options offered by VMware ESX, Linux LXC, and FreeBSD Jails but presents some important differences such as not allowing either to perform a hardware emulation or run any other kind of operating system except Oracle Solaris 11 or prior Oracle Solaris versions.

In Oracle Solaris Zones, the fundamental idea is to create different small operating system installations (children) inside the main operating system (parent) by sharing or dividing (using the resource manager) the existing resources between these children installations. Each installation will have its own init files and processes, although it shares the kernel with the parent operating system, resulting in a lesser overhead than previously quoted solutions. Using...