Solaris Operating System Hardware Virtualization Product Architecture

Short Description
In the IT industry, virtualization is a mechanism of presenting a set of logical computing resources over a fixed hardware configuration so that these logical resources can be accessed in the same manner as the original hardware configuration. The concept of virtualization is not new. First introduced in the late 1960s on mainframe computers, virtualization has recently become popular as a means to consolidate servers and reduce the costs of hardware acquisition, energy consumption, and space utilization. The hardware resources that can be virtualized include computer systems, storage, and the network.

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Content
Server virtualization can be implemented at different levels on the computing stack, including the application level, operating system level, and hardware level:
• An example of application level virtualization is the Virtual Machine for the Java™ platform (Java Virtual Machine or JVM™ machine)1. The JVM implementation provides an application execution environment as a layer between the application and the OS, removing application dependency on OS-specific APIs and hardwarespecific characteristics.
• OS level virtualization abstracts OS services such as file systems, devices, networking, and security, and provides a virtualized operating environment to applications. Typically, OS level virtualization is implemented by the OS kernel. Only one instance of the kernel runs on the system, and it provides multiple virtualized operating environments to applications. Examples of OS level virtualization include Solaris™ Containers technology, Linux VServers, and FreeBSD Jails. OS level virtualization has less performance overhead and better system resource utilization than hardware level virtualization. Since one OS kernel is shared among all virtual operating environments, isolation among all virtualized operating environments is as good as the OS provides.
• Hardware level virtualization, discussed in detail in this paper, has become popular recently because of increasing CPU power and low utilization of CPU resources in the IT data center. Hardware level virtualization allows a system to run multiple OS instances. With less sharing of system resources than OS level virtualization, hardware virtualization provides stronger isolation of operating environments.
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