I guess it depends on how familiar you are (or willing to become) with OpenSolaris and how much you need the performance vs how much you'd like to stay with what you know. Zones should be much lower overhead than guest VMs, but you'd want all services (web, mail jabber etc.) to be native OpenSolaris implementations (should be OK for such standard stuff, but maybe a few configurations discrepancies). It could also be a great way to learn other features of OpenSolaris, by setting up processor sets to partition resources amongst your zones, using cloned ZFS snapshots and/or de-duplication for efficient storage of zone images, and using crossbow to virtualise your network topology. Some of these features can also be done with XVM, but you might find the tutorials focussed on zones.
NOTE: some features mentioned are only available in the more recent (and slightly buggy) 'dev' versions in IPS, at least until Oracle finally brings out release 2010.06(07?), and note also that the latest development build of OpenSoalris has just killed off brandz (mainly because it was stale and unresourced), so if you NEED a linux guest, don't rely on brandz as a long term answer! -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
