Over the years businesses have been building large-scale information systems to solve business problems, with a focus on building scalable and highly available IT infrastructures that can adapt change. Providing sufficient availability and performance for business applications was the primary driver for these efforts. Today, the need to protect technology investments and provide the same service levels at a lower price point is shifting the focus to reducing IT infrastructure cost and improving end user service level management. To help this effort, the Solaris Operating System includes Solaris Containers, a mechanism that provides isolation to safely and securely share resources between software applications or services using flexible, software-defined boundaries.

This Sun BluePrint article discusses the challenges organizations face in dealing with resource and workload management. Solaris Containers, and their constituent technologies (projects, resource pools, Zones) are introduced and explained. Practical examples that show these technologies solving resource and workload management problems are demonstrated.