Kernel Zones Intro

There is a new virtualization technology called "Kernel Zones" which became available in Oracle Solaris 11.2. In this lab we will explore its new features and compare it to other Oracle virtualization technologies.

60 seconds of theory

Solaris Zones were first announced in 2005 in Solaris 10 and then became a popular way of managing application workloads. They are very flexible, extremely lightweight and provide very good isolation of resources. But Solaris Zones require that all applications in every zone run under the same version of OS Solaris, which runs in the global zone. In some situations it might become an unnecessary restriction. To answer this limitation, Solaris engineers created a new virtualization technology which allows you to run zones with different versions of Solaris under one global zone. This technology is now called "kernel zones" because they run their own kernels. We continue calling the earlier Solaris Zones technology "non-global" zones.

In this lab we will compare various features of kernel zones and non-global zones side-by-side and analyze how and where we can use them. Please pay special attention to the command prompts: they indicate where we perform the operation. Our global zone is called solarislab; kernel zones will be called kzone1, kzone2, etc.; traditional non-global zones are called zone1, zone2, etc.