To Zone or not to Zone? That is the question

Lately I've been very interesting (some would say obsessed) with Solaris 10's Zones technology. It's a lightweight virtual machine technology, giving you some of the benefits of high-level VM servers like VMWare (isolation of services to specific operating system instances, consolidating apps to increase server utilization), with far less CPU and memory overhead. (Rather than running a bunch of separate operating systems w/ virtualized hardware, all of the Zones run off the same Solaris kernel.)

I've been toying w/ the idea of using zones to isolate nodes on our Vista cluster, but have come to the conclusion that the benefits are outweighed by the extra administrative overhead: there's a new "box" to maintain for each Zone, with its own startup processes, users, etc. Patching or adding packages the "global" zone requires applying those same patches and packages to each hosted zone, which complicates things quite a bit.

WebLogic is really good about binding to a single network interface, which is what we've done in the past on machines running several nodes. And since Vista is a Java app, it's already running in a VM: a JVM, that is.

I'll still use Zones to do some cool stuff, like running an Oracle server, our development farm, a MySQL server, and other stuff on one physical machine. But for production, I'd rather not worry about the (relatively minimal) care and feeing of Zones. I have too much other stuff to do (like blogging, for instance!)