On 5 February 2014 10:03, Rich Teer <[email protected]> wrote: > ZFS support is mandatory (including the ability to boot from a > mirrored pool), as are DTrace and Zones. I only need server > stuff, so I'm not worried about desktop-friendly distros; looking > at the distro comparison table on illumos.org, it would seem > that OpenIndiana is my best option, but I am open to suggestions! > > Oh, I will also probably want to build my own software packages > (e.g., Sendmail, Bind, etc.) on these machines too.
One of the options worth considering is SmartOS[1] -- with the disclaimer that I enthusiastically work for its corporate steward, Joyent. Our distribution is designed to be easy to operate as a server running some set of customer (or internal) zones and KVM virtual machines. The latter allows you to run legacy operating systems like Linux or Windows alongside your zones, if you need to. The system boots from a "platform image"; a relatively compact RAM disk (~200MB) that you store on a USB key or load from an ISO. Upgrading to a new platform image simply requires copying a new platform image onto your USB key, updating the grub menu and rebooting. You can also PXE boot these images. By booting from a device that is _not_ the system pool we can support any pool configuration -- mirrored, RAID, or otherwise. Your workloads themselves will run inside zones, which are cloned quickly from "images" -- essentially just ZFS snapshots. The Joyent-provided "base" zone images contain a pkgsrc-based binary package set with several thousand packages. There are also various community-provided appliance datasets available[2]. We have a #smartos channel on Freenode where Joyent engineers tend to hang out, and a SmartOS-specific community mailing list. Also, if you ever decide you need zone hosting in the cloud, Joyent runs the same operating system and zone images that we provide as opensource in the Joyent Public Cloud[3]. Cheers. [1]http://smartos.org/ [2]http://smartos.org/smartos-mailing-list/ [3]http://www.joyent.com/products/compute-service -- Joshua M. Clulow UNIX Admin/Developer http://blog.sysmgr.org ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
