SmartOS 20200102

Version 20200102 Release Date: January 2, 2020

SmartOS In a Nutshell

SmartOS is a specialized Type 1 Hypervisor platform based on illumos.  It supports two types of virtualization:

• OS Virtual Machines (Zones): A light-weight virtualization solution offering a complete and secure userland environment on a single global kernel, offering true bare metal performance and all the features illumos has, namely dynamic introspection via DTrace
• Hardware Virtual Machines (KVM, Bhyve): A full virtualization solution for running a variety of guest OS's including Linux, Windows, *BSD, Plan9 and more

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.  This architecture has a variety of advantages including increased security, no need for patching, fast upgrades and recovery.

Virtualization in SmartOS builds on top of the foundational illumos technologies inherited from OpenSolaris, namely:

• ZFS for storage virtualization
• Crossbow (dladm) for network virtualization
• Zones for virtualization and containment
• DTrace for introspection
• SMF for servicemanagement
• RBAC/BSM for auditing and role based security
• And more

SmartOS is typically "installed" by downloading and copying the OS image onto a USB key and then booting that key.  On the first boot a configuration utility will configure your base networking, allow you to set the root password, and allow you to select which disks to use to create the ZFS Zpool which will provide persistent storage.

When you log into SmartOS you will enter the "global zone".  From here you can download VM Images using the imgadm tool, which are pre-configured OS and KVM virtual machines.  You can then use the vmadm tool to create and manage both OS and hardware virtual machines.