future of all-in-one ZFS-based hypervisor

[mixer]

I just recently started learning about SmartOS - an Illumos-based OS which focuses on hosting virtual machines via Zones and also KVM. I'm sure there are some shortcomings, but it seems the idea of having the 'hypervisor' itself host the ZFS pool is a major advantage over the clever but complex method of using ESXi as the hypervisor with virtualized ZFS NAS providing storage for the other VMs.

I bet SmartOS would benefit from a Napp-It style web gui. Are you interested in this, Gea? What are your thoughts? Is there a way that makes sense to combine SmartOS and OmniOS with Napp-it?

I would kind of like to dump ESXi though I have to admit is has been good to me (and for free no less!).

I'll be doing some more YouTube watching of SmartOS presentations and may answer some of my own questions here, and I'll report back, but I wanted to open up the topic.

 

[gea]

I just recently started learning about SmartOS - an Illumos-based OS which focuses on hosting virtual machines via Zones and also KVM. I'm sure there are some shortcomings, but it seems the idea of having the 'hypervisor' itself host the ZFS pool is a major advantage over the clever but complex method of using ESXi as the hypervisor with virtualized ZFS NAS providing storage for the other VMs.

I bet SmartOS would benefit from a Napp-It style web gui. Are you interested in this, Gea? What are your thoughts? Is there a way that makes sense to combine SmartOS and OmniOS with Napp-it?

I would kind of like to dump ESXi though I have to admit is has been good to me (and for free no less!).

I'll be doing some more YouTube watching of SmartOS presentations and may answer some of my own questions here, and I'll report back, but I wanted to open up the topic.

SmartOS may be very attraktive but it is currently mainly a Cloud/ KVM only platform while napp-it is a storage appliance. To bring them together one would need

- a online wget script to setup/ add/ modify a default Smart installation to prepare a minimal napp-it wget setup:
that includes perl with the Expect.pm module and other parts like smartmontools or netcat, opt mc, bonnie etc

- a script to setup services in the global zone like Cifs (workgroup and domain mode), NFS opt AFP, Comstar
- a script to save these settings to your datapool (on demand)
- a script to restore these settings from datapool on startup

This seems a lot of work that I cannot do.
If someone gets it up I would add it as a currently unsupported and free user-add on or
someone can support and offer as a nonfree extension (partly or at all).

 

[cactus]

OmniOS might be another to look at for KVM and it already has napp-it support.

Adding more than storage management and all its dependents(drive subsystem, networking, cron, etc.) to core napp-it would be scope drift to me. For management of SmartOS look into FIFO.

 

[sboesch]

SmartOS looks interesting, that would definitely serve as a potential replacement for Linux Virtual Hosting, I wonder if anyone is developing a customer Control Panel for customer logins.

 

[Mike]

Cloudmin looks alright for that kind of stuff. I was pretty impressed by how tidy it is, certainly compared to webmin.

 

[Jeggs101]

I get why they would make a VPS style host with web pages. A lot of sites are read heavy so L2ARC would work very well.

Bad thing is that Linux has things like cPanel. Installing nginx on solaris looks like this: http://wiki.nginx.org/Installing_on_Solaris_10_u5

 

[sboesch]

I think I need to add SmartOS to my To Do List.

 

[NeverDie]

I just recently started learning about SmartOS - an Illumos-based OS which focuses on hosting virtual machines via Zones and also KVM. I'm sure there are some shortcomings, but it seems the idea of having the 'hypervisor' itself host the ZFS pool is a major advantage over the clever but complex method of using ESXi as the hypervisor with virtualized ZFS NAS providing storage for the other VMs.

I bet SmartOS would benefit from a Napp-It style web gui. Are you interested in this, Gea? What are your thoughts? Is there a way that makes sense to combine SmartOS and OmniOS with Napp-it?

I would kind of like to dump ESXi though I have to admit is has been good to me (and for free no less!).

I'll be doing some more YouTube watching of SmartOS presentations and may answer some of my own questions here, and I'll report back, but I wanted to open up the topic.

Did anyone here ever end up using SmartOS for this purpose?