Solaris is a Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. It superseded their earlier SunOS in 1993. Oracle Solaris, as it is now known, has been owned by Oracle Corporation since Oracle's acquisition of Sun in January 2010
Solaris 10 was first released in 2005. Updated releases are named by the month and year of release. The latest update, also called Update (U8), is Solaris 10 10/09, released in October 2009.
The Zettabyte File System (ZFS), introduced early in Solaris 10, can now support the root file system and be used to boot the system. Support for user- and group-level disk quotas has also been added to ZFS.
Solaris Zones and Solaris Containers provide virtualization and resource containment. Zones isolate one or more application services within the operating system. A Container is a Zone that also manages operating system resources to prevent one Zone from consuming all real system resources. Recently added resource management features allow CPU usage to be limited in multiple ways: fair-share, capped or dedicated. Memory and network bandwidth resources can also be managed.
A Zone may establish a separate instance of the TCP/IP networking stack through an Exclusive IP Zone, allowing the Zone to have a unique network configuration.
Logical domains (now called Oracle VM Server for SPARC) provide a higher level of virtualization abstraction. A logical domain runs a virtual machine within which an operating system can be booted, halted and rebooted (requires Solaris 10 11/06, U3, or later). Other operating systems supported by SPARC hardware may also be supported. Ubuntu Linux can be run in a logical domain.
Many security features previously available in a special release of Solaris called Trusted Solaris have been incorporated into the regular release as of Solaris 10 5/08 (U5). Solaris Trusted Extensions include fine-grained privileges using Mandatory Access Control for policy-based access to system resources such as devices, files, networks, printing and window management. User Rights Management provides role-based access control and complies with the Federal Information Processing Standard.
