SmartOS is a hypervisor, an imaging system (via imgadm), a provisioning system (via imgadm / vmadm / Triton), a geographically distributed datacenter virtualization (via Triton) and an OS virtualizer (via Solaris zones). A SmartOS with a Joyent branded zone runs a native container at bare metal speed, with CPU bursting in the kernel as an added bonus, when the kernel detects a CPU intensive process. The whole thing is backed by ZFS and runs from memory. There is no installation.
As the Joyent branded zone is the native instantiation of the OS sharing the same kernel, there is no hardware virtualization, or rather, hardware is virtualized only once and zones then share the abstraction, as they are just normal UNIX processes. It's a completely different approach than hardware virtualization. One global zone can have up to 8192 non-global zones all sharing the same kernel, and the imgadm / vmadm combination makes the Docker problem become a non-issue.
As the Joyent branded zone is the native instantiation of the OS sharing the same kernel, there is no hardware virtualization, or rather, hardware is virtualized only once and zones then share the abstraction, as they are just normal UNIX processes. It's a completely different approach than hardware virtualization. One global zone can have up to 8192 non-global zones all sharing the same kernel, and the imgadm / vmadm combination makes the Docker problem become a non-issue.