There's an advocacy piece, in Forbes of all places, that offers a pretty unbalanced perspective on Solaris. (I hesitate to even link to it, because it feels like sensationalism just to generate huge numbers of outraged readers.) The author, Dan Woods, doesn't mention any negative points to Solaris at all, which should raise the suspicions of any reader with critical thinking skills, but I wanted to debunk some of the virtualization statements in particular:
Dan claims that Linux virtualization is the result of un-coordinated development from a number of companies, and Solaris virtualization is better because it's engineered "top to bottom" at a single company. Seamless integration can certainly offer advantages (see Apple), but I take issue with both his observations about the ecosystem and the conclusions he draws from them.
Aside from containers, Solaris uses hypervisors from Xen (marketed as xVM), and VirtualBox (from the innotek acquisition). Neither of those solutions were designed for Solaris; they were adopted years later to fill gaps in Sun's offerings. However, they are currently developed by Sun, so you still have the "single company" argument. About that...
Where I come from, being completely dependent on a single company is a bad thing, and I'm not even talking about the freedom of open source. It's called "vendor lock-in," and it's bad because there's no competition and customers are at the mercy of that single company's roadmap. Companies invest lots of money developing and supporting 3rd party ecosystems because it's a critically important to their customers. Anyways, looking at it from another angle, isn't it disturbing that virtualization ISVs don't consider Solaris important enough to target? Sun had to buy them outright or develop solutions in-house.
Dan claims Solaris containers cause a 2% performance degradation, vs. "about 20% for a hypervisor." While it's true that Forbes isn't a good forum for presenting performance analyses, without even a hint about where they came from, offering these numbers is ridiculous. It's often true that you can pick a specific benchmark and environment to support any argument, but Dan didn't even pretend.
Finally, I thought Dan's most interesting claim was the one for which he didn't offer any supporting arguments at all: that Solaris is now safe. Even if he's right, and Solaris is indeed the most awesome OS ever seen, that still doesn't guarantee it a slot on the Oracle roadmap.
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