System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System is part of a multivolume set that covers a significant part of the Solaris Operating System administration information. This book assumes that you have already installed the operating system and set up any networking software that you plan to use.This Solaris release supports systems that use the SPARC and x86 families of processor architectures: UltraSPARC, SPARC64, AMD64, Pentium, and Xeon EM64T. The supported systems appear in the Solaris 10 Hardware Compatibility List at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl. This document cites any implementation differences between the platform types. The Sun xVM Hypervisor is based on the work of the Xen community. The hypervisor supports multiple operating system instances simultaneously. In a running system, the hypervisor fits between the hardware and the operating system. The hypervisor virtualizes the system's hardware to transparently share and partition the system's resources, such as CPUs, memory, and network interface cards (NICs), among the user domains. A Solaris Container is a complete runtime environment for applications. Solaris Resource Manager and Solaris Zones software partitioning technology are both parts of the container. These components address different qualities the container can deliver and work together to create a complete container. The zones portion of the container provides a virtual mapping from the application to the platform resources. Zones allow application components to be isolated from one another even though the zones share a single instance of the Solaris Operating System. Resource management features permit you to allocate the quantity of resources that a workload receives.The container establishes boundaries for resource consumption, such as CPU. These boundaries can be expanded to adapt to changing processing requirements of the application running in the container. Solaris Containers for Linux Applications use Sun's BrandZ technology to run Linux applications on the Solaris Operating System. Linux applications run unmodified in the secure environment provided by the non-global zone feature. This enables you to use the Solaris system to develop, test, and deploy Linux applications.To use this feature, see Part III, Branded Zones. For information on using zones on a Solaris Trusted Extensions system, see Chapter 16, Managing Zones in Trusted Extensions (Tasks), in Solaris Trusted Extensions Administrator’s Procedures. This book is intended for anyone responsible for administering one or more systems that run the Solaris release. To use this book, you should have at least one to two years of UNIX system administration experience. &sagset;&sundocs;&typeconv;