In Oracle Solaris 10 we introduced Oracle Solaris Containers -- lightweight virtual application environments that allow you to consolidate your Oracle Solaris applications onto a single Oracle Solaris server and make the most of your system resources.

The majority of our customers are now using Oracle Solaris Containers on their enterprise systems for applications ranging from web servers to Oracle Database installations. We can also make these Containers highly available with Oracle Solaris Cluster, the industry's first virtualization-aware enterprise cluster product. Using Oracle Solaris Cluster you can failover applications in a Container to another Container on a single system or across systems for additional availability.

We've added significant features in Oracle Solaris 11 Express to improve and extend the Oracle Solaris Zone model:

• Integration of Zones with our new Solaris 11 packaging system (aka Image Packaging System) to provide easy software updates within a zone
• Support for Oracle Solaris 10 Zones to run your Solaris 10 applications unaltered on an Oracle Solaris 11 Express system
  
• Integration with the new Oracle Solaris 11 network stack architecture (more on this in a future blog post)
  
• Improved observability with the zonestat management interface and commands
  
• Delegated administration rights for owners of individual non-global zones
• Tight integration with Oracle Solaris ZFS to allow dedicated datasets per zone
• With ZFS as the default file system we can now provide easy to manage Boot Environments for zones

This quick summary is just to whet your appetite to learn more about Oracle Solaris 11 Express Zones enhancements. Fortunately we can serve a full meal at the Oracle Solaris 11 Express Technology Spotlight on Virtualization page on the Oracle Technical Network.