Zones are in Solaris Express (Solaris 10)

snoofy writes "Zones, as people from SUN Microsystems have talked about for some time are now available in solaris express (the pre-release of Solaris 10). This will let you virtualize Solaris so that processes run in isolation from other activity on the system... A system can then be configured to run several zones which will make it look like different systems on the network Some info from a posting to comp.unix.solaris. The cool stuff is that it works on both SPARC and x86."

Comments

in comparison?

[beware1000]

what kind of advantage does this have over say... a chroot jail? or are processes in different zones jailed off from one another?

Details

[Anonymous Coward]

Disclaimer: I am not the author of the following post, I took it from here.

I believe this is not too far from what you can achieve with user mode linux. We've been using similiar technology in unix classes at school using uml.

There are however few differences:

1.) Solaris accesses host filesystem, while in user mode linux, you have to provide file or block device with disk image it will use. This is quite bad, because you have to preallocate space for zones. There is a project that aims to allow this, but I don't know how usable is this. You could of course overcome this by doing Root FS on NFS and dhcp and letting the guest os mount host's partition via NFS. This would probably have quite significant performance overhead though :(. Filesystem in filesystem is not very optimal too.

2.) It is not that easy to setup. This could be done with few scripts. I would love Debian and possibly other distros to have scripts, which would instantly create the zone's filesystem. Preferably, it would allow for some sharing (f.e. creating hard links to original data and kernel would unlink, copy transparently if slave wants to write -- some equivalent of copy on write seen in memory management).

3.) The networking is not so easy to setup. Could be also part of the script

4.) Linux does not have so well done resource allocation as Solaris. So the guest kernel should be able to limit itself (f.e. not to use more than 30% of cpu time). Is it possible to do some precise resource allocation under Linux (maybe using some patch to kernel, or something like that?)

How's this different from running wmware?

[joda]

... or bochs for that case.

Seems to me it's just a fancy name for an already existing product.