[ianmcgowan]

Not sure if "lightweight" counts when talking about a mainframe, but when first encountering Solaris zones they seemed equivalent to LPAR's in the mainframe world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_%28operating_system%29

There are a lot of things from the mainframe world that are being newly "discovered" that seem quite mundane to the greybeards...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_z#Comparison_to_othe...

[binarycrusader]

Yes, there are LPARs, but we were discussing software-based virtualisation. LPARs are more partitioning than virtualization which is very different from a multi-tenancy perspective.

The equivalent to LPARs in the Solaris world would be LDOMs on SPARC.