A zone provides isolation at almost any level of granularity you require. A zone does not need a dedicated CPU, a physical device, or a portion of physical memory. These resources can either be multiplexed across a number of zones running within a single domain or system, or allocated on a per-zone basis using the resource management features available in the operating system.
Each zone can provide a customized set of services. To enforce basic process isolation, a process can see or signal only those processes that exist in the same zone. Basic communication between zones is accomplished by giving each zone IP network connectivity. An application running in one zone cannot observe the network traffic of another zone. This isolation is maintained even though the respective streams of packets travel through the same physical interface.
Each zone is given a portion of the file system hierarchy. Because each zone is confined to its subtree of the file system hierarchy, a workload running in a particular zone cannot access the on-disk data of another workload running in a different zone.
Files used by naming services reside within a zone's own root file system view. Thus, naming services in different zones are isolated from one other and the services can be configured differently.