With Solaris 10 Sun launched an OS partitioning technology known as Containers.
Containers permit to create Zones where the original operating system appear as a new instance, with its own network settings and applications.
By default Solaris Containers, which offer what SWsoft offers today on Linux and Windows with Virtuozzo, can only create multiple native OS partitions so they aren’t comparable to VMware or Microsoft virtualization technologies. But this could change soon.
A new project called BrandZ appeared on the Open Solaris community:
BrandZ is a framework that extends the Solaris Zones infrastructure to create Branded Zones, which are zones that contain non-native operating environments. The term “non-native” is intentionally vague, as the infrastructure allows for the creation of a wide range of operating environments.
Each operating environment is provided by a brand that plugs into the BrandZ framework. A brand may be as simple as an environment with the standard Solaris utilities replaced by their GNU equivalents, or as complex as a complete Linux userspace.
Actually BrandZ is already in the work, with an available lx brand able to run Linux binary application unmodified on a Solaris zone, on x86 or x64 environments.
Another project called ZoneBSD, started quite a year ago, aims to run a FreeBSD environment on a Solaris zone as well.