To put it (maybe too) simply, SmartOS is a fork of OpenSolaris targeted at virtualization in a data center. Joyent uses it for its cloud hosting offerings and has hired many of the key engineers from the glory days of Sun Solaris and ZFS.
I originally intended to move to OpenSolaris, but that is now dead. Joyent is one of the main driving forces behind open ZFS development now.
My initial motivation for moving Solaris was ZFS, but SmartOS does also make virtualization extremely simple and convenient. There's really no reason not to virtualize everything. It supports KVM for Linux guests (or Windows even), but Solaris Zones are very lightweight, which is great for virtualizing uneven workloads. (For example, a KVM locks down its RAM allocation, but RAM is dynamically allocated to zones, so you can oversubscribe RAM if you have many zones and it's appropriate to the workloads.)
SmartOS boots the global zone from an auxiliary medium (usually a USB stick), and it runs completely from RAM, so all the disks are available for the ZFS data pool. Each zone and KVM gets its own dataset in the persistent zone. No services run in the global zone. (Well, sshd does.)
As such, the zones *are* Solaris (the kernel). You would usually install a pre-made image (= filesystem) into each zone.
I'm sure Oracle Solaris is great if you have the $$$, but otherwise SmartOS is probably currently one of the best ways to run Solaris in the data center.
It's cool, check it out… :)
Best,
Chris
Am 04.09.2013 um 11:31 schrieb Tom Cross HIDDEN@tml.com.au>:
> Hi
> I thought Smart OS was for mounting Virtuals or running in Zones, will you be running Solaris in a Zone on SmartOS??
>
>
>
> <html-tom.jpg>
>
> On Sunday 01/09/2013 at 23:10:11, Chris Ferebee wrote:
>>
>> I’m getting ready to start mirroring my current Linux SurgeMail server (6.4b-52) to a new SmartOS server. (Using 6.4a-1 - ChrisP, could you do a current specials build for Solaris 10 sometime?)
>>
>> What is the correct way to handle g_popfetch? Do the two servers automatically cooperate to avoid fetching the same email twice and then possibly mirroring it both ways, resulting in duplicates? I have several users who need to use popfetch.
>>
>> Best,
>> Chirs
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