Introduction to the Sun xVM Hypervisor
The hypervisor is a virtualization system for the Solaris operating system on x86
machines. Unlike virtualization using zones, each guest domain runs a full instance of
an operating system.
The hypervisor can securely execute multiple virtual machines simultaneously on a single x86
compatible computer, with each virtual machine running its own operating system.
Each virtual machine instance is called a domain. There are two kinds of
domains, the control domain and the guest domain. The control domain is also
known as a domain 0, or dom0. A guest operating system, or unprivileged
domain, is also called a domain U or domU.