Sun just released its flagship operating system, bringing in a lot of many new features and changes and among others a software partitioning technology aimed to server consolidation, called Containers (well the real name is Zones, while Containers are zones with resource management plus).
Solaris 10 can be used for free for non-commercial and commercial use, thanks to the new Sun license. This makes Solaris 10 a serious competitor on whole software consolidation market, competing in some ways with XEN virtualization project.
A big question is what VMware will do now: a significant part of users requested Solaris 10 as host OS for GSX Server and Workstation, but a lot more asked for having it fully supported as guest OS (actually there is an experimental only support).
I’m already thinking about an high density consolidated server with VMware on bottom and different Solaris 10 Containers in every VM…