DBs on Solaris containers pros and cons opinion

[tylerv]

Oracle/Sun uses the terminology pretty interchangeably, however a zone is a Solaris virtual machine while a container is a zone with resource limitations. A plain zone has more flexibility and fewer limitations on how it shares the global machine's resources (and thereby more risk if one zone tries to grab all the resources). The first few pages of this doc explain it well: http://www.usenix.org/publications/l...penpdfs/hu.pdf

These 3 articles on my blog outline some of our issues and resulting troubleshooting around running several zones on a decently-sized Sun server, with lots of databases: http://dban00b.wordpress.com/tag/zones/

Edit: I should say, since I didn't say either way, that we really like using them and we have moved all of our 150+ databases onto zones in the last year. We use them in production, but with far fewer databases living together on a global zone than we have in non-production.