[aquadrop]

> Zones however are superior to VM’s because they don’t require hard pre-allocation of resources like virtual machines do, so they are a superior choice in environments where Windows isn’t desired or required.

In public cloud that's not a problem, that's a requirement, so one VM wouldn't trash all its neighbors.

[Annatar]

That is what containers are for. On SmartOS a container is used to constrain resource limits of a zone, but if a zone is using less than the limits it’s more efficient in terms of hardware. However, if one is not using this technology, one is forced to hard partition with virtual machines.