Back in 2010, Linux in fact had Zones: It was called OpenVZ, and by early 2011 a bunch of tiny web hosting providers were giving people root on OpenVZ Linux virtual servers for $15 a year. I still have two KVM Linux virtual servers which cost me only about $40 a year.
I used OpenVZ to turn a decommissioned IBM desktop (which I asked corporate IT to fill with memory and disks from the other identical machines) into a departmental development server. It was on this machine we tested the scripts that migrated half a million blogs from a proprietary tool into WordPress.
Years later, the machine was still chugging around on top of that floor's networking rack. Someone added a PostIt with "Do not turn this off".
But I have to say OpenVZ didn't do all the tricks one could do with Zones, and Zones combined with Crossbow, were able to test a huge number of networking scenarios to see how things would break.