Energy Efficiency Strategies: Sun Server Virtualization Technology

Overview

Virtualization technology is a key to transforming an IT organization's server, storage, and network devices into a shared, global pool of resources. This can help reduce space, power, and cooling requirements while simultaneously helping make datacenters more flexible and agile. The two server virtualization technologies discussed in this paper - Solaris Containers and Logical Domains - are of particular importance because of the low overhead they impose on the host server platform. Solaris Containers abstracts a single Solaris OS instance into multiple containers, giving the appearance of a dedicated OS instance to each container. Solaris Containers is an excellent virtualization technology when a number of applications can run on the same OS instance.