Summarizing virtualization technologies from Sun


Inspired by a recent discussion on Xen Discuss about what different virtualization solutions were available from Sun I thought I’d take the information provided by Volker A. Brandt and Bernd Schemmer and put it into a convenient table.

Name Sparc x86 Method OS Kernel Guest OS
xVM X software(1) many various
VirtualBox X software many various
Containers/Zones X X software one Solaris/branded
LDOMs X hardware many Solaris(2)
Domains (Mx000 series) X hardware many Solaris
Domains (E10K, SF##K series, v1280, v4800) X hardware many Solaris, Linux

Footnotes(1) with CPU assistance for “full” virtualisation(2) experimental Linux/BSD (?) supportActually, Sun have a pretty good summary, but some of the technologies are hidden behind the hardware on which they run, for example LDOM is a firmware-level solution built into many of the SPARC hardware solutions.