Before you can install your ADE, you need to plan and set up the virtualized environment that will host the ADE. One important consideration is the balance between isolation and flexibility.
The following table describes the virtualization models available for Oracle Solaris.
Each environment contains what appears to be a private copy of the OS in a container. The OS virtualization model provides near-native performance and flexibility, and has a much smaller disk, RAM, and CPU footprint than either virtual machines or physical machine.
By using virtual machines, you can run multiple OS instances with a single set of hardware resources. Each virtual machine that you create runs its own OS. A software or firmware hypervisor creates the illusion that each guest OS instance is running on its own system. Although virtual machines provide less resource flexibility than a physical machine that uses OS virtualization, they provide more isolation.
Hardware partitions provide physical separation between the running OS and its separate set of resources and power. Because this model does not use a hypervisor, it provides bare-metal performance. This virtualization model provides the most isolation but it is much less flexible with resource configuration than either the virtual machine or OS virtualization model.
The following diagrams illustrate some of the virtualization models described in the table.