Blastwave has a nice introduction about Solaris zones. I would very like to see a comparison between zones, good old chroots and something like Linux Virtual Server, or User-Mode-Linux, each compared with their benefits and disavantages.
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comparison
UML has substantially low performance compared to N1 Grid Containers. If you're going to compare a server virtualization feature, compare to something like the Xen Virtual Machine [cam.ac.uk], in this performance comparison [cam.ac.uk], you can see the performance of UML is rather appalling, especially compared to Xen.
The performance of Solaris Grid Containers is more akin to Xen or FreeBSD jails. However, the advantage N1 Grid Containers have over Xen is that they are portable to every platform Solaris runs on (SPARC, IA32, AMD64) whereas Xen only emulates one platform (IA32). Also, other Solaris features to which there are currently no Linux counterparts such as the Fair Share Scheduler, which allows a N1 Grid Container to be bound to certain processors, and given a dedicated percentage (or share) of available processor resources. This provides an advantage over Xen and UML which can't even use multiple CPUs. It has an advantage over FreeBSD jails where monopolization of system resources by a single jail cannot be easily avoided.
-- ike willis