Operating systems running inside Logical Domains can be started, stopped, and rebooted independently.
A running domain can be dynamically reconfigured to add or remove CPUs, RAM, or I/O devices without requiring a reboot.
Logical Domains exploits the chip multithreading (CMT) nature of the "CoolThreads" processors.
This lets the processor gain throughput that is lost during cache misses in conventional CPU designs.
Each domain is assigned its own CPU threads and executes CPU instructions at native speed, avoiding the virtualization overhead for privileged operation trap-and-emulate or binary rewrite typical of most VM designs.
When hosts are connected to shared storage (SAN or NAS), running guest domains can be securely live migrated between servers without outage (starting with Oracle VM Server for SPARC version 2.1).
The process encrypts guest VM memory contents before they are transmitted between servers, using cryptographic accelerators available on all processors with sun4v architecture.
Service domains can provide virtual LANs and SANs as well as bridge through to physical devices.
Disk images can reside on complete local physical disks, shared SAN block devices, their slices, or even on files contained on a local UFS or ZFS file system, or on a shared NFS export or iSCSI target.
I/O domains have direct ownership of a PCI bus, or card on a bus, or Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) function, providing direct access to physical I/O devices, such as a network card in a PCI controller.