They would be eating Linux's lunch if they were used in any wider scale.
A primary objection to Solaris zones and a reason they're not used widely is that they run on Solaris and not on Linux.
Linux took 20 years to make its way into the enterprises, and well, SmartOS has to start somewhere. We are only at the beginning of the journey, but with one major difference: unlike Linux, which is still maturing, an illumos based operating environment has 37 years of enterprise abuse and hardening behind it.
> A primary objection to Solaris zones and a reason they're not used widely is that they run on Solaris and not on Linux.
What exactly is objectionable about running a Solaris-like operating environment? If it is software, SmartOS provides ~14,000 packages:
https://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/building-packages-at-scale.h...
When SmartOS or generally Solaris-descendants' zones start being anywhere near popular, then we'll talk about eating Linux's lunch. For now the situation doesn't look like that even remotely.
> What exactly is objectionable about running a Solaris-like operating environment?
To me -- not much at first sight. But there is the factor of familiarity, which is very, very important. There are plenty of sysadmins, you know, who can recover Linux from almost any failure, and gaining similar knowledge in different OS takes quite long time. Solaris derivatives (or BSDs, for that matter) are at huge disadvantage to those people.
By eating Linux's lunch I meant how good, reliable and capable the zones and lx-branded zones technology is. It is very reliable and very capable. It works very well while Linux is still trying to find itself within the cloud container paradigm: look at how many competing solutions there are on Linux in that space, and every single one of them exists because the other one lacked something, or did not do it in a satisfctory way. That is what I meant by everybody's flapping on Linux with containers.
Meanwhile, there are no such issues or problems in the illumos and SmartOS communities: the tech used there has been designed from the ground up to be secure and work for large enterprises, and unlike the Linux cloud technology, it has been in heavy use for ten years now. illumos and SmartOS are not trying to still find themsselves, because zones, ZFS, and Crossbow network virtualization already worked for years. Back in 2006 for instance, at a place where I worked, we were already packing eight Oracle databases per 32 GB RAM system, in production. Now it's 2016, and zones have only gotten better with the addition of KVM and Crossbow network virtualization.
> But there is the factor of familiarity, which is very, very important. There are plenty of sysadmins, you know, who can recover Linux from almost any failure, and gaining similar knowledge in different OS takes quite long time. Solaris derivatives (or BSDs, for that matter) are at huge disadvantage to those people.
As for those people, they had to learn Linux too; they can go back to the roots and learn a real UNIX the correct way now, and be glad that they have the opportunity to do so.
If one truly knows UNIX, one understands Linux on a much deeper level.
