N1 grids (Solaris 9) and containers (Solaris 10) are more or less the same. In Sol9 it was a seperate product, now it is integrated in the OS and therefore got a new name.
A container is more or less just a sandbox, you can use to run an application inside. The container MUST have the same OS Release, but afaik CAN HAVE DIFFERENT patchreleases. The Admin can define which resources are visible to the container. The container itself does not "know" it is the container, but it can find it out. The container is more or less a set of processes, which are visible from the "real host".
The big advantage of a container vs virtual host (like vmware) is the very small overhead with the big disadvantage, that you are not realy flexible with the client OS.
Afaik there is nothing like vmware for Solaris (SPARC platform), but I heared something on the Solaris 10 Roadshow that vmware will support Solaris 10 x86/x64 on the opteron platform!?
Best Regards,
Franz
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Solaris System Manager from Munich, Germany
I used to work for Sun Microsystems Support (EMEA) for 5 years in the domain of the OS, Backup and Storage