[OmniOS-discuss] combo storage/virtualization server

[Eric Sproul]

On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 5:23 PM, Paul B. Henson <henson at acm.org> wrote:
> OmniOS seems production ready (although I don't think I can swing the $4k/yr
> support contract for my home deployment ;) ), includes kvm support, and I
> like the minimalistic approach for the base OS. I've been thinking about
> giving it a try, and was wondering if anybody has done much virtualization
> with it and might provide some feedback as far as how that's been working
> out.

Hi Paul,
OmniTI has been using OmniOS in production for quite some time.  We do
both native zones and Linux as KVM guests in our environments.  It
works well.

>
> I was also curious about the issues OmniTI had with minimizing OpenIndiana,
> and was wondering if the same issues might be encountered with illumian.
> illumian is only going to be a server OS, and not include any of the GUI or
> desktop packages, so potentially would be easier to minimize.

The biggest issue with OpenIndiana minimization was the interlocking
incorporation dependencies.  Breaking those dependencies apart
requires publishing alternate versions of those packages to another
repo.  Once you start down the path of maintaining an alternate set of
packages, you "own" them in the sense that you're responsible for
maintaining them, incorporating upstream changes, etc.  We ended up
with OmniOS as a logical extension of that process-- by the end there
was no OI in the picture.

AIUI, Illumian is taking the Illumos core plus whatever other userland
bits they want, and packaging them with dpkg/apt.  As to their focus
on desktop vs. server or both, I have no information.

Eric