What distinguishes Solaris Containers from virtual domain technologies, such as LPARs?
Joost Pronk van Hoogeveen: LPARs are a typical virtual machine technology with a hypervisor layer between the hardware and the operating system, whereas Solaris Containers are a type of operating system virtualization. Virtual domains and virtual machines allow different types of operating systems to be run concurrently on the same physical machine. But, as with all virtual machine technologies, there is significant performance overhead to this approach. By contrast, Solaris Containers are very lightweight and create hardly any performance overhead. But Solaris Containers permit only a single operating system version.
