About Virtualization
The goal of virtualization is to move from managing individual datacenter components to
managing pools of resources. Successful server virtualization can lead to improved server utilization
and more efficient use of server assets. Server virtualization is also important for
successful server consolidation projects that maintain the isolation of separate systems.
Virtualization is driven by the need to consolidate multiple hosts and services on
a single machine. Virtualization reduces costs through the sharing of hardware, infrastructure, and
administration. Benefits include the following:
Increased hardware utilization
Greater flexibility in resource allocation
Reduced power requirements
Fewer management costs
Lower cost of ownership
Administrative and resource boundaries between applications on a system
Virtualization products offered by Sun Microsystems include the following:
Logical Domains (LDoms), the SPARC hypervisor virtualization solution for running multiple operating system instances on a single machine simultaneously
SunTM xVM hypervisor, the x86 hypervisor virtualization solution for running multiple operating system instances on a single machine simultaneously
Native and branded zones containers, which provide isolated execution environments within a Solaris operating system instance and can be run within a Solaris guest domain
Resource management features, which enable you to control how applications use available system resources
Network virtualization features
Operating system-level virtualization features, such as zones or resource management, can be used
in LDoms and in Sun xVM guest domains that have a Solaris release
installed in them. Network virtualization is used throughout virtualization technologies.
