SmartOS looks interesting mix and foss
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmartOS
https://www.joyent.com/smartosanyone tried it ?
Lightweight Virtualization
Lightweight virtualization in SmartOS means that:
There is only one OS, and for practical purposes it is read-only
You boot from a USB stick. Want to upgrade your OS? Pop in a new USB stick. I can't overstate the fundamental rightness of that.
In all other respects, each zone or container is its own virtual machine, with its own network interfaces, etc., isolated from the rest of the universe
You get bare-metal performance from your hardware - no emulation, no virtual I/O driver talking to a real I/O driver, no extra memory copies getting data in or out
You can do a lot more with minimal hardware than you could if you were running full-blown virtualization (though SmartOS supports KVM, so if you want Linux VMs you can have them)
Each zone is its own ZFS volume - so you get a bulletproof, enterprise grade filesystem with redundancy, snapshots you can zap over to another machine, and easy management -
Yeah, it's been around for a while.
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SmartOS is part of the Illumos family.
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If interested in the former Solaris ecosystem, check out https://omniosce.org/
