That's basically how SmartOS does it, as long as you're doing SMB or Samba. And boy, is it ephemeral: the entire OS is loaded into RAM from a USB stick (usually

That's basically how SmartOS does it, as long as you're doing SMB or Samba. And boy, is it ephemeral: the entire OS is loaded into RAM from a USB stick (usually) on boot, and everything gets loaded from the zpool, as OC said, and if you need anything, you put it in a zone. Even VM hypervisor goes in a zone, because it's essentially free and gives you nice clean separation (and quotas, reservations, etc.). Though NFS can only be shared from the global zone, so if you need NFS you don't get to play with zones.