FSM: Virtualization in OpenSolaris

Posted on October 16th, 2007 by Yousef Ourabi

The Free Software Magazine has an excellent article by Rami Rosen on Virtualization in OpenSolaris

An interesting thing to note is that Solaris Zones were created in response to FreeBSD jails — which allow light weight virtualization of the FreeBSD host system.

What isn’t mentioned is that Solaris (proprietray) recently announced the capability to fully virtualize linux (Red Hat) and windows guest operating systems.

This is an interesting addition to the existing virtualization heavy weights like Xen and VMWare.

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Filed under: Virtualization


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2 Responses to “FSM: Virtualization in OpenSolaris”

  1. Ian Brown, on November 20th, 2007 at 1:36 pm Said:

    >Solaris (proprietray) recently announced the capability to fully >virtualize linux (Red Hat) and windows guest operating systems.

    Can you elaborate on this a bit ?
    To which technology are you referring ?

    Is it Xen ? ldoms ? or something else?

    Regards,
    Ian

  2. Yousef Ourabi, on November 20th, 2007 at 3:17 pm Said:

    Ian,

    Yes — and sorry for being less clear than I could be.

    As you may know Solaris previously had “Zones” which was essentially a container — compartmentalizing the network stack and a file-system giving the appearance of a mostly stand-alone host.

    This was in direct response to FreeBSD Jails (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail).

    There are several draw backs to Zones, for one only another Solaris instance can be “Zoned” as it is not true virtualization (as in Xen)

    This new release includes true virtualization features, similar to Xen and VMWare allowing a zone to run Windows or Red Hat linux.

    Hope this helps.

    Best,
    Yousef Ourabi

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