Updated: As of Oracle Solaris 11.3 Kernel Zones now support Live Migration on x86 and SPARC platforms
From time to time as the product manager for Oracle Solaris Virtualization I get asked by customers which virtualization technology they should choose. This is probably because of two main reasons.
- Choice: Oracle Solaris provides a choice of virtualization technologies so you can tailor your virtual infrastructure to best fit your application, not to have force (and hence compromise) your application to fit a single option
- No way back: There is the perception, once you make your choice if you get it wrong there is no way back (or a very difficult way back), so it is really important to make the right choice
Understandably there is occasionally a lot of angst around this decision but, as always, with Oracle Solaris there is good news. First the choice isn’t as complex as it first seems and below is a diagram that can help you get a feel for that choice. We now have many many customers that are discovering that the combination of Oracle Solaris Zones inside OVM Server for SPARC instances (Logical Domains) gives them the best of both worlds.
Second with Unified Archives in Oracle Solaris 11.2 you always have a way back. With a Unified Archive you can move from a Native Zone to a Kernel Zone to a Logical Domain to Bare Metal and any and all combinations in-between. You can test which is the best type of virtualization for your applications and infrastructure and if you don’t like it change to another type in a few minutes.
