Solaris Zones are an application and resource management feature of Solaris 10. A zone environment typically consists of resources such as process management, memory, network configuration, file systems, package registries, user accounts, shared libraries, and in some cases, installed applications. Zones provide a means of creating virtualized operating system environments within an instance of Solaris, allowing one or more processes to run in isolation from other activity on the system. It also provides an abstraction layer that separates applications from physical attributes of the machine on which they are deployed, such as physical device paths and network interface names, and network routing tables. This isolation prevents processes running within a given zone from monitoring or affecting processes running in other zones, regardless of user ID and other credential information.
A zone is a sandbox within which one or more applications can run without affecting or interacting with the rest of the system.
For detailed information about Solaris Zones, see the System Administration Guide — Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Solaris Zones at http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-1592.