Zones in Solaris 11 are even closer to the capabilities of a fully autonomous VM, yet with the performance efficiencies of a shared kernel. With the extremely fast creation and boot capabilities they provide, (not to mention the zero incremental license cost), there is very little reason to use a full-blown VM solution any more. In fact, even if you still need one, you can now use Oracle VM for free. Support for it costs extra but is based on physical number of CPU sockets rather than number of VMs.

With the added observability of zonestat, plus the greater autonomy of zone-local Boot Environments, you can now have a virtual datacenter on a single commodity priced box. This all comes without the barriers of inter-VM communication that full virtualization solutions tend to bring along with them as baggage.