Comparison Zones (Containers) versus Logical Domains (LDoms)

Topic	Zones	LDoms
Master Solaris 8	No	No
Master Solaris 9	No	No
Master Solaris 10	Yes	Yes
Guest Solaris 8	Yes, SPARC only	No
Guest Solaris 9	Yes, SPARC only	No
Guest Solaris 10	Yes	Yes
x86 Hardware	Yes, Solaris 10 only	No
SPARC Hardware	Yes	Yes

Notes:

Zones act much like Xen or KVM in that the global zone must be up and running for the local zones to be available. A Solaris 10 zone will share most of the OS with the global zone. This allows for density.

Branded zones allow running Solaris 8 or 9 within a Solaris 10 global zone. This is only available on SPARC hardware (due to limitation of Solaris 8 & 9 to run on x86 hardware)

LDoms are managed by the hypervisor within system firmware. So domains can be booted without affecting other domains (even the primary domain).