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Weblog:		What is Xen, and Why is it cool?
Subject:		Zones a better alternative for virtualization
Date:		2005-02-18 17:24:38
From:		derekmorr

While Xen does sound intereting, for production virtualization, I think Solaris Zones is a much better alternative. It still gives you a secure environment, but it saves a lot of memory and disk space. You don't have to run and maintain a full-blown OS for each service you run. And, Zones let you create multiple-cpu containers, unlike Xen (currently).

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Zones a better alternative for virtualization
2005-02-21 08:02:45 Sysadmn [View]

The other way-cool part of Solaris Zones versus UML, BSD Jails, or Xen is that they're tied to resource limits. I hope Xen picks this up - it's great to be able to tell a virtual machine, "If things get busy, you get at most 1/2 a CPU and 512 MB of memory. If no one else is busy, use all you want." We can put 10 dev instances on a machine - each developer thinks they have their own machine (including reboots, root password, etc). The only thing they can't do is load testing - but that's what QA is for, right?