Then, they went on to contribute their work to Illumos.
Finally, they've set up smartos.org, with the entire source code available at github.
What this means:
- An alternative to VMWare, Xen and KVM on Linux, where you now have the Illumos kernel (a fork of the opensolaris) powering your OS level virtualization.
- If it's just ruby/Python/Java/PHP apps you're running, then these can run within a Zone - you need not necessarily have a full blown OS to run your apps.
- You get the benefits of DTrace to trace performance. With KVM based guest OS, you can trace all manner of performance and resource utilization of the VM instance using DTrace.
- High speed VM setups. With ZFS clones, you'll be able to set up Windows VMs at a very high speed. (I've not done this with KVM on Illumos, but I have done this with Xen on OpenSolaris, as well as with ZFS-iSCSI, so I know that this works out very well).
- As per the FAQ, it'll be possible to use the OpenStack infrastructure to manage SmartOS too. This is something that I hope to try out real soon !
All in all, very exciting times ahead !
