Solaris 10 containers integrated

Solaris 10 have a technology known as brandz, which can be seen as a translation layer between the Solaris kernel and a local zone. This layer can be used to provide an execution environment inside the zone that mimics another release of Solaris or even another OS. This have been used to create the LX brand that runs Linux inside a container and it have also been used to crate Solaris 8 and 9 containers.

This have probably helped accelerate Solaris 10 adaptation and made it easier for customers to take advantage of new Solaris features and hardware even if their application environment could not be upgraded. A good example of this is that you can take a Solaris 8 application, put in in a branded zone and use dtrace, which was not available before Solaris 10 to debug the application.

Now that Solaris 10 containers have integrated plan is to provide a similar service for Solaris 10 so that installations and zones can be migrated into Solaris 10 containers on OpenSolaris. This is probably even more important now since all version of Solaris post 10 will feature a whole new packaging system. Upgrades from Solaris 10 to any later Solaris release is not possible and will probably never be in the way we have known upgrades in earlier Solaris releases.

It will be possible migrate both existing Solaris 10 zones(v2v) and whole installations(p2v) into containers on OpenSolaris.

You can take a look at the change here where there is also a link to the PSARC which contains much more information.