The Deploy Oracle Solaris 10 Zones is one of the workflow documents that we introduced. It explains how to set up zones on Oracle Solaris 10 systems. (There's a similar workflow for setting up zones on Oracle Solaris 11 systems, too.)
This is the workflow image:
The left side gives you the prerequisites - you need a working EC and PC, configured libraries, and (as you suspected) hardware and operating systems.
The workflow itself takes you through the How-Tos needed to get Oracle Solaris 10 zones running. If you don't have OSes installed, the Provisioning Oracle Solaris 10 Operating System how-to explains how to do so. From there, the Creating Oracle Solaris 10 Zones how-to shows you how to install the zones themselves, and the Creating a Server Pool for Zones how-to shows you how to group them together into server pools. From there, the Operate Zones workflow will give you a path for keeping your new zones running.