Introduction to the Sun xVM Hypervisor

The hypervisor is a virtualization system for the Solaris operating system on x86 machines. Unlike virtualization using zones, each guest domain runs a full instance of an operating system.

The hypervisor can securely execute multiple virtual machines simultaneously on a single x86 compatible computer, with each virtual machine running its own operating system.

Each virtual machine instance is called a domain. There are two kinds of domains, the control domain and the guest domain. The control domain is also known as a domain 0, or dom0. A guest operating system, or unprivileged domain, is also called a domain U or domU.