Container
 

Please explains me about Container in machine Sun or in Solaris OS, is it equal to LPAR at IBM?
thx

It's isn't equal.

IBM doesn't have currently an equivalent, although the future AIX 6 is announcing something looking like it.

LPAR virtualize the hardware while containers virtualize the O/S.

Containers are a combination of SRM and Zones. SRM is about controlling the resources (CPU, memory, ...) that a process, a user, an application and a zone use.

Zones is a kind of virtualization with which multiples instances of the O/S are installed on separate directories, but share the same kernel, which has been enhanced starting from Solaris 10 to ensure full isolation between zones (except the global zone that see all). Think of it like an enhanced chroot environment. You can reboot zones independantly, each zone has its own IP address(es), processes, user accounts, and do not see other's zones processes. BSD has "jails" which is similar, Linux closest feature is VServer.

The advantage of Zones in front of LPAR or similar tools is they are much lightweight. You can have dozens of zones running on a single CPU machine. The main limitation of zones is you cannot install different O/Ses on zones, although the BrandZ project is partially answering the issue: You can run native Linux applications in it.

Should you look for something like LPAR on Sun H/W, then have a look to Domains on high-end machines or LDOM on UltraSPARC T based servers.

On Solaris for x86, the closest product is the Open Source Xen.

Thank's jlliagre