[rescue] Cheap, fast, PC server

[Francois Dion]

The only use we've had for actual VM has been for windows servers (not
that we would use any if we were not forced to). For linux and
solaris, I run everything under solaris with zones. With zones + zfs,
I can clone instantly (ie, deploy a new server in the time it takes to
type 1 single command, you can even move to a different machine) a
solaris or a centos machine. I can similarly deploy a fully configured
Oracle Apps 3 tier stack with 1 command per "machine". With zfs clone
and snapshots, I can roll back after I've messed something up (roll
back an oracle database or apps patch that broke something else) and
use barely any extra space for my various QA, test, training etc
instances.

With zones, you can share memory and/or constrain the zone or down to
the process, so it is a lot more cost effective than VMs, instead of
having to reserve, say, 2GB per VM. And no hypervisor to steal
cpu/network and memory. So, even on a lowly base 24 thread (6 core)
T1000 with 2GB, I have 5 development (not oracle apps, this is a
different system, but it does run oracle database) instances and a
build instance, 3 tiered, running at full speed, but with VMs, I would
have needed 24GB (2GB+1GB+1GB per instance due to OS overhead and
minimum requirements checks by scripts).