[OmniOS-discuss] hardware specs for illumos storage/virtualization server

[Paul B. Henson]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 09:26:09PM +0000, John Ratcliffe wrote:

> Thanks for pointing me at MythTV. I haven't encountered this before. Is 
> this unsupported on the OpenSolaris family? Is that why you propose 
> using linux?

It would probably be difficult to get it working under Solaris. There
are windows and mac os x ports, but the primary development is under
Linux.
 
> If you can't use OmniOS for everything, would it not be better to use 
> linux as the host OS when using KVM? I haven't done any benchmarking 
> yet, but my understanding is that KVM "works best" with linux (whatever 
> "works best" really means)?

Before joyent ported kvm, I was originally planning on having a zfs
storage server and a separate linux kvm virtualization server. It would
be nice to combine them for efficiency and cost savings. kvm is
developed under Linux, so that platform will indeed have the latest
features and possibly performance. OTOH, zfs under linux is still a bit
immature. It's a trade-off, the final outcome of which I haven't yet
determined.

> There seems to be an Arch linux distro that is specifically for MythTV 
> support. Was this the kind of install for MythTV you had in mind?

I current run myth under Gentoo, which is my intended kvm guest too.

> You talk about illumos. Is this your preferred platform rather than OmniOS?

illumos is the base OS underlying omnios, open indiana, smartos, etc.
It's not really suitable for deployment on its own, but is extended and
packaged by various distributions based on it. Many implementation details
can be shared across distributions, and I tend to refer to "illumos"
when discussings things like hardware support, and only to a specific
distribution when discussings particulars of that distribution.

> From the googling I have done about the OpenSolaris family it looks 
> like Intel NICs are the most reliable choice. Do you agree?

Probably. They're likely the most common in server class hardware.