A new Sun BluePrints article discusses the differences between Containers and Zones, and how to get the most out of them. The pdf file is located here.
Solaris Containers and Zones
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Eugenia Loli
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Jails on BSD. Is it has secure?
Yes we know about all the great new advances in Solaris 10. Quiet already.
Did you read the article? Solaris Containers and Zones go way beyond BSD jails. If you want to compare read the Containers article, then read this and see for yourself:
http://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/papers/jail/jail.html
article discusses the differences between Containers and Zones
Containers are what the Solaris folks call it. Zone is what Sun’s marketing folks came out with first. Eventually they’ll call it Containers and the Zone
marketing term will be dropped, because the Solaris folks hate that name.
If your statement was correct, you could create Zones with Solaris 8 (which you can’t). Read the article and you will see there is a difference. Solaris 8 projects, resource controls (with Resource Manager purchased separately). Solaris 9 projects and resource controls, Solaris 10 Zones, projects and resource controls. Page 90 shows the history of these features as they were included in Solaris releases.
Saha, there is some inaccuracy in what you wrote. Zones is a name invented by us in Solaris engineering. It’s the name we typically use when we discuss the feature. We have commands in the OS including zoneadm, zonecfg, etc.; all of the data structures are named: zone_t, zone_state_t, etc. The name zone is here to stay.
Containers, on the other hand, are more of a way for marketing (and engineers, too) to talk about a collection of technology which our customers can use to do server consolidation. So, the solaris resource manager, extended accounting facility, dynamic resource pools, and zones are all part of our overall containers strategy.
I suspect that the confusion stems for the fact that marketing initially called Solaris Containers “N1 Grid Containers.” It was pretty quickly realized that “Solaris Containers” would make a lot more sense to most people, and so the terminology has been changed.