Lead Image © Paulus NR, 123RF.com

SmartOS as a virtualization platform

Clever and Smart

Out of the ashes of OpenSolaris, the SmartOS [1] cloud platform is rising to position itself as a competitor to Amazon EC2. The Unix-like operating system is developed by Joyent, a virtualization and cloud computing company.

After Sun published the source code of Solaris under the name OpenSolaris in 2005 and then Oracle discontinued open development of the software soon after its takeover in 2010, a small OpenSolaris community quickly developed, including companies such as Nexenta, who used the free system as the basis of their products.

Nexenta, a core of Solaris engineers, Joyent, and other players founded and contributed to the Illumos project based on a fork of the free Solaris kernel. The Illumos kernel then became the basis for a variety of free Solaris offshoots, such as OpenIndiana, Illumian, EON, OmniOS, and Joyent's SmartOS.

Joyent has put much effort into the development of SmartOS to create a highly flexible basis for its own cloud. To ensure this flexibility, Joyent, or more specifically Max Bruning, ported the Linux KVM hypervisor to the OpenSolaris kernel. This project took about six months before Joyent had KVM running on SmartOS and thus able to support any guest systems that work with KVM.

KVM for Solaris

Before the KVM port, SmartOS already had Zones, which originated with Solaris, that offered operating system virtualization with containers and very little ballast.

However, Zones normally restrict you to the host operating system, even through branded Zones with Linux already existed in Solaris. In any case, full virtualization with KVM offers more options for running various systems as guests, including Microsoft.

Another advantage of SmartOS is that it provides complete support for the DTrace tracing framework that can trace kernel and userspace programs at run time with very little

Buy ADMIN Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES

Print Issues

Digital Issues

 

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Print Subs

Digisubs

 

TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS

US / Canada

UK / Australia