Glossary

AMD's extensions that make the x86 architecture HVM-capable.

Half of a virtual driver, providing an interface between the virtual device and an underlying real device. See frontend driver.

A virtual environment where the virtualization product is directly installed on physical hardware, acting like a host operating system. The opposite of a hosted environment.

In Perl, the term used to denote class membership of an object.

An instance of the BrandZ functionality, which provides non-global zones that contain non-native operating environments used for running applications.

An isolated environment in which to run non-native applications in non-global zones.

A limit that is placed on system resource usage.

The process of placing a limit on system resource usage.

The pool created by the system when pools are enabled.

See also resource pool.

The processor set created by the system when pools are enabled.

See also processor set.

A type of set in which the members of the set do not overlap and are not duplicated.

Fully privileged domain, can create and destroy other domains, access real hardware, and so forth.

Virtual machine instance.

Completely unprivileged domain; only virtual devices are accessible.

Information about the disposition of resources within the resource pools framework for a given system at a point in time.

On SPARC based systems, the ability to reconfigure hardware while the system is running. Also known as DR.

A flexible way to record resource consumption on a task basis or process basis in the Solaris Operating System.

A scheduling class, also known as FSS, that allows you to allocate CPU time that is based on shares. Shares define the portion of the system's CPU resources allocated to a project.

A virtual device and its associated driver in a guest domain that communicates with a backend hosted in another guest domain. See backend driver.

See fair share scheduler.

An administrator with superuser privileges or the Primary Administrator role. When logged in to the global zone, the global administrator can monitor and control the system as a whole.

See also zone administrator.

Actions that apply to resource control values for every resource control on the system.

The zone contained on every Solaris system. When non-global zones are in use, the global zone is both the default zone for the system and the zone used for system-wide administrative control.

See also non-global zone.

Process-allocated scratch memory.

Hardware-assisted virtual machine. These are virtual machines that can take advantage of Intel-VT and AMD-V extensions.

A layer between software environments and physical hardware that virtualizes the system's hardware.

Non-global zone that provides a Linux environment for applications.

Local actions taken on a process that attempts to exceed the control value.

Memory that cannot be paged.

The percentage of physical memory utilization on the system that will trigger cap enforcement by the resource capping daemon.

In the Projects and Tasks (Overview) chapter of this document, a reference to both LDAP containers and NIS maps.

A virtualized operating system environment created within a single instance of the Solaris Operating System. The Solaris Zones software partitioning technology is used to virtualize operating system services.

See zone administrator.

To read data from a file into physical memory one page at a time.

To relocate pages to an area outside of physical memory.

The paravirtualized domU operating system is ported to run on top of the hypervisor, and uses virtual network, disk, and console devices.

See resource pool.

The poold system daemon that is active when dynamic resource allocation is required.

A disjoint grouping of CPUs. Each processor set can contain zero or more processors. A processor set is represented in the resource pools configuration as a resource element. Also referred to as a pset.

See also disjoint.

A network-wide administrative identifier for related work.

The size of the resident set. The resident set is the set of pages that are resident in physical memory.

An aspect of the computing system that can be manipulated with the intent to change application behavior.

A daemon that regulates the consumption of physical memory by processes running in projects that have resource caps defined.

Fundamentally, a Solaris process. Process model entities such as the project and the task provide ways of discussing resource consumption in terms of aggregated resource consumption.

A per-process, per-task, or per-project limit on the consumption of a resource.

A functionality that enables you to control how applications use available system resources.

An exclusive subset of a resource. All of the partitions of a resource sum to represent the total amount of the resource available in a single executing Solaris instance.

A configuration mechanism that is used to partition machine resources. A resource pool represents an association between groups of resources that can be partitioned.

A process-bindable resource. Most often used to refer to the objects constructed by a kernel subsystem offering some form of partitioning. Examples of resource sets include scheduling classes and processor sets.

See resident set size.

A kernel thread that identifies infrequently used pages. During low memory conditions, the scanner reclaims pages that have not been recently used.

A complete runtime environment for applications. Resource management and Solaris Zones software partitioning technology are both parts of the container.

A technology that enables the creation of a runtime environment for Linux applications in a non-global zone on x86 or x64 machines running the Solaris Operating System.

A software partitioning technology used to virtualize operating system services and provide an isolated, secure environment in which to run applications.

A type of non-global zone that has inherit-pkg-dir resources and optimizes the sharing of objects.

A representation of the way in which an administrator would like a system to be configured with respect to resource pools functionality.

In resource management, a process collective that represents a set of work over time. Each task is associated with one project.

Intel's extensions that make the x86 architecture HVM-capable.

A type of non-global zone that does not have inherit-pkg-dir resources.

The size of the working set. The working set is the set of pages that the project workload actively uses during its processing cycle.

An aggregation of all processes of an application or group of applications.

See also working set size.

An administrator having the Zone Management profile. The privileges of a zone administrator are confined to a non-global zone.

See also global administrator.

The status of a non-global zone. The zone state is one of configured, incomplete, installed, ready, running, or shutting down.