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.