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Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

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Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#201

Post by tw04 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #166
mihaic wrote: post #149

I'm really curious: what kind of workload would companies want to run on a custom Unix that isn't Linux/Mac/BSD? I'm rooting for more mature OS diversity, I just have no idea who the end users would be and what their needs would look like.

This is not a user-facing detail of the product. Customers run VMs on the rack, they do not build their applications for illumos. They're gonna run whatever operating system in those VMs that they need to accomplish their goals.

That being said - there's something to be said for enterprise support. Are there plans to support importing/converting/running third party OVAs? Many vendors will support something running in KVM, I can't recall the last time I saw b-hyve as a supported hypervisor.

I'd imagine as broadcom slowly destroys vmware's market share vendors will look to alternatives, but I doubt b-hyve is even a blip on their radar at this point.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#202

Post by steveklabnik »

tw04 wrote: post #201
steveklabnik wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a user-facing detail of the product. Customers run VMs on the rack, they do not build their applications for illumos. They're gonna run whatever operating system in those VMs that they need to accomplish their goals.

That being said - there's something to be said for enterprise support. Are there plans to support importing/converting/running third party OVAs? Many vendors will support something running in KVM, I can't recall the last time I saw b-hyve as a supported hypervisor. I'd imagine as broadcom slowly destroys vmware's market share vendors will look to alternatives, but I doubt b-hyve is even a blip on their radar at this…

I don't know the status of supporting OVA as a file format, but we absolutely support creating and uploading your own images. Here are the current docs on how to do so: https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/creating-and-sharing-imag...

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#203

Post by amluto »

steveklabnik wrote: post #176
amluto wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it’s worth, there’s a somewhat common view at least in the Linux community that it’s important for hardware vendors to make their tech stack targetable from the office or home. This isn’t to be polite or to make money — it’s to foster adoption among developers, which drives sales. Some examples: x86 owned the desktop, workstation and laptop world for a long time. So everyone targeted x86, which made x86 the…

I certainly understand that strategy generally, see also Adobe giving Photoshop licenses to students back in the day so that they'd be familiar professionally. It's just that doing so amounts to building an entirely new product, and as a relatively young startup, focus is more important. We're going deep, not wide. Someday :) > (Also, I get the idea behind two SKUs, but can buyers at least configure storage and compu…

On reading the specs, you’re using 2.91TiB U.2 drives. On the list of “oh my gosh too much engineering and too many stock keeping units,” allowing them to be swapped for the much larger U.2 devices one can buy now seems fairly easy. In case there’s a potential thermal issue, most NVMe drives I’ve checked have active power states that are a bit slower but have reduced power consumption.

But Oxide is small and shouldn’t listen to me unless a customer asks for this.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#204

Post by amluto »

mbreese wrote: post #196
amluto wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it’s worth, there’s a somewhat common view at least in the Linux community that it’s important for hardware vendors to make their tech stack targetable from the office or home. This isn’t to be polite or to make money — it’s to foster adoption among developers, which drives sales. Some examples: x86 owned the desktop, workstation and laptop world for a long time. So everyone targeted x86, which made x86 the…

> This isn’t to be polite or to make money — it’s to foster adoption among developers, which drives sales. I get that in theory… and it makes sense most of the time. I’m not sure it does this time though. You don’t exactly “target” Oxide as an OS or platform. Rather, you use it to run VMs on. Those VMs are whatever you want. Other than that, I’m not sure what else having a home-lab version of Oxide would look like. A…

People target AWS and GCP and Azure, and they write actual code that interacts with them, do test deployments there, and do real deployments there.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#205

Post by Anon_Is_Truth »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #63
temptemptemp111 wrote: post #48

What even is Oxide Computer? It makes no sense - it was publicized with all sorts of anti-blob, freedom, and posts about management engines and a sort of alternative to RaptorCS/IBM (which now has blobs again)... Yet most of that stuff is now buried/removed and Oxide Computer is just a hardware platform with unnecessary lock-in. For the bunker of the rich to be able to run their own mini-cloud? Sure. For anything els…

It's a mainframe. You use it like you use mainframes, but probably easier, as they're adopting more modern functionality. You won't be aware you're using it, just like you aren't aware when you use a zSystem.

[dead]

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#207

Post by DominoTree »

milon wrote: post #24

I'm glad this is out, i'm going to deploy this locally and learn as much about it as possible. Oxide is pretty much the company I dream to work at, both for the tech stack, plus the people working there. Thank you Oxide team!

>> Oxide is pretty much the company I dream to work at, both for the tech stack, plus the people working there.

Thought I was the only one :P

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#208

Post by msla »

criddell wrote: post #121

I’m unfamiliar with illumos so I went to their webpage and the very first thing it says is: > illumos is a Unix operating system Is illumos an actual Unix (like macOS) or a Unix-like OS (like GNU/Linux)?

Legally, NetBSD isn't actually Unix. The brand doesn't mean what people seem to think it means.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#209

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

DominoTree wrote: post #207
milon wrote: post #24

I'm glad this is out, i'm going to deploy this locally and learn as much about it as possible. Oxide is pretty much the company I dream to work at, both for the tech stack, plus the people working there. Thank you Oxide team!

>> Oxide is pretty much the company I dream to work at, both for the tech stack, plus the people working there. Thought I was the only one :P

I mean, I phrase it as "my dream job is systems integration at Sun" (but Oxide is the living equivalent)

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#210

Post by codethief »

steveklabnik wrote: post #119
codethief wrote: post #101

Can anyone ELI5 what Oxide's offer is? I've looked at their website and still got no clue. Is it hardware + software I can purchase and use on-premise? Is it a PaaS / yet another cloud provider?

I believe you're being downvoted because there is already a big thread about this here, though I think that's a bit unfair to you. I haven't posted in that thread yet because I wanted to let others say what is meaningful about the product to them, but this seems like a good place to put my reply. Regardless of all that: it is hardware + software you can purchase and use on-premise, that's correct. The differentiator…

Thanks so much for elaborating!
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