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SmartOS

docs.smartos.org

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Re: SmartOS

#41

Post by Zaskoda »

re-lre-l wrote: post #24

I am a huge fan of SmartOS. Back in the 2010s (around 2012), I was advocating its use in production at a small startup I worked. The SunOS kernel, ZFS, zero install, immutable core, convenient way to manage containers and VMs together - all of this looked great on paper, especially containers. In reality, I ended up running almost everything in VMs. The only thing worked well natively was nginx. MongoDB, Mysql, even…

So many PHP libraries are just wrappers for some other library. I think that's mostly a strength, but in this case it was clearly a weakness.

Re: SmartOS

#42

Post by cmdrk »

ofrzeta wrote: post #13

I was intrigued by the idea that in the Manta object store you could schedule computations on the storage nodes. However I am not sure how much improvement that brings in practice. Any practical experience with this? https://apidocs.tritondatacenter.com/manta/index.html

bcantrill gave a great talk many years ago about compute-data locality. would be nice to know if those ideas panned out for some customers, but it seems the world has by-and-large continued to schlep data back and forth.

it's too bad too. The concepts behind Manta were such a great idea. I still want tools that combine traditional unix pipes with services that can map-reduce over a big farm of hyperconverged compute/storage. I'm somewhat surprised that the kubernetes/cncf-adjacent world didn't reinvent it.

Re: SmartOS

#43

Post by rtaylorgarlock »

fridder wrote: post #29
re-lre-l wrote: post #24

I am a huge fan of SmartOS. Back in the 2010s (around 2012), I was advocating its use in production at a small startup I worked. The SunOS kernel, ZFS, zero install, immutable core, convenient way to manage containers and VMs together - all of this looked great on paper, especially containers. In reality, I ended up running almost everything in VMs. The only thing worked well natively was nginx. MongoDB, Mysql, even…

not sure if you have given FreeBSD a chance yet and it has an in-progress jail/vm frontend: https://github.com/AlchemillaHQ/Sylve

Ah, very cool. Thanks for sharing; will try it out

Re: SmartOS

#44

Post by ktm5j »

nZac wrote: post #3

> SmartOS is a "live OS", it is always booted via PXE, ISO, or USB Key and runs entirely from memory, allowing the local disks to be used entirely for hosting virtual machines without wasting disks for the root OS. Does anyone know if something like this is possible with Proxmox? I've got three servers I'm thinking of setting up as a small cluster and would like to boot them from a single image instead of manually se…

It's close, but there are some missing pieces I think. The way it manages storage pools would fit your use case, if you import a zpool, for example, it will scan the datasets and can figure out what zvols should be attached to which VMs..

but there's also VM config info under `/etc/pve` or something similar. I'm pretty sure that's some kind of FUSE filesystem, it's supposed to be synchronized between cluster members.. you might be able to host that externally somehow. But that'll probably take some effort.

You'll also need to figure out how to configure `/etc/network/interfaces` on boot for your network config. But that's doable.

Would be pretty neat.

Re: SmartOS

#45

Post by ktm5j »

xenophonf wrote: post #11
nZac wrote: post #3

> SmartOS is a "live OS", it is always booted via PXE, ISO, or USB Key and runs entirely from memory, allowing the local disks to be used entirely for hosting virtual machines without wasting disks for the root OS. Does anyone know if something like this is possible with Proxmox? I've got three servers I'm thinking of setting up as a small cluster and would like to boot them from a single image instead of manually se…

You can boot ProxMox VMs via PXE: https://blog.kail.io/pxe-booting-on-proxmox.html But why bother? A read-only disk image would be simpler.

Pretty sure they want to boot the hypervisor itself via PXE, not the VMs.

Re: SmartOS

#46

Post by tylerhillery »

tombert wrote: post #28

Genuine question: in 2026, what does SmartOS (or any other Illumos/Solaris OS) buy you over something like Linux or FreeBSD?

Oxide uses Helios, their own illumos-based distro: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/helios

They’ve written up their reasoning in this RFD: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0026#_comparison_illum...

Re: SmartOS

#47

Post by 0x457 »

sneak wrote: post #14

So, Solaris > OpenSolaris > Illumos > SmartOS? Do I have that right?

OpenSolaris was an official OSS version of Solaris which was essentially Solaris, but developed in the open by Sun.

Illumos started as "remove all close source bits and replace with OSS", after Oracle closed down OpenSolaris, Illumos became a full-on fork and Solaris-like rather than another version of Solaris.

From there, multiple distros were born (because Illumos didn't want to be distro), notably OpenIndiana and SmartOS. OpenIndiana being a general purpose distro of Illumos. While SmartOS went with something like "OS for HCI datacenters"

So it's Solaris > OpenSolaris > Illumos.

Re: SmartOS

#49

Post by oooyay »

nZac wrote: post #3

> SmartOS is a "live OS", it is always booted via PXE, ISO, or USB Key and runs entirely from memory, allowing the local disks to be used entirely for hosting virtual machines without wasting disks for the root OS. Does anyone know if something like this is possible with Proxmox? I've got three servers I'm thinking of setting up as a small cluster and would like to boot them from a single image instead of manually se…

Kind of. You can run Talos on Proxmox so I don't see why you couldn't run this, but frankly I'd just install Talos or SmartOS on the metal like god intended.
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