Virtualization: Solaris Containers are better?

Paul from ZDnet has some reasons to say why one ought to choose Solaris against other solutions.

Part of the issue here is that the popularity of PC style virtualization responds to issues the Unix community has never had - the pretend professionalism implicit in copying data processing's commitment to partitioning, and the nineties NT manager's learned aversion to trusting NT with more than one application at a time.

Notice that both of these illustrate what happens when people refuse to adapt as reality changes - the cost and memory management issues that drove partitioning and VM in the 1960s were history by the late seventies, and today's Windows servers can easily handle a number of concurrent applications provided that the load process leaves the registery in a consistent state and no more than one hacks it during operations.

Obviously there are some commets that beg to disagree. I liked the one by toadlife

"because you need to pay for the VM licensing and support, and indirectly because the OS/Applications licenses you need to run on the larger memory or multi-processor models most people select as virtualization hosts usually cost more;"

Wrong. VMware ESX does not cost *that* much money, and in the vast majority of cases, the hosts do not require more virtual processors and memory than their physical counterparts. Furthermore, most servers sit around all day doing absolutely nothing, and times when every server needs processor time are rare, unless your setup is unusual. It also shares common memory pages between hosts, so if you are running five copies of Win2k3 on on physical machine, and they all have the same ntoskernel.exe, that kernel will only be loaded once into memory of the physical machine. The result is that a typical Windows server will only take up around 20-50MB of unique memory from the physical server.

Check out toadlife's full response.

I know, I know. Thread virtualization, network is the computer, multi-core processors, cored-threads, X-cores. KVM. openVZ. I'm sure a lot of people are already cringing as they clutch on to their wallets even harder!

Bottom Line: There are a lot of reasons for customers to choose ESX Servers. There are a lot of reasons to experiment a lot of other things in the labs. How a technology like ESX got to the production? Well ask all those customers!