At the SIGCSE conference we fielded several questions from professors about deploying oodles of zones on a single server. They all wanted to use zones as a tool for teaching system administration skills -- ideal, I think, since each zone is its own virtual machine but without requiring a whole system!
Nils has an example of using ZFS clones to create ~100MB fully isolated and fully functional BrandZ (lx branded -- Linux, if you haven't been watching closely) zones on his blog: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/nilsn?entry=nearly_instantaneous_deployment_of_linux This works today, and you can get all the bits you need from OpenSolaris.org. I'll also happily post instructions on how to do this for Solaris zones on my blog if anyone is interested in trying it out. Regards, - Eric
