Chroot, BSD Jails, Solaris Zones. It doesn't really take the wisdom of Solomon to know that nothing is new under the sun. Many of these problems have been solved before, and the whole "lets get away from VMs" is hilarious after most of my customer spend years and millions migrating off better UNIX technologies to get everything to "VMWare/Linux/X86" because the CIO read about it in a magazine.
The business model was a problem in that world for sure, but the tech wasn't.