New Image Tools for SmartOS – “Starting with our newer machine images we’ve introduced a few customer specific utilities to help you in the SmartOS world: Quickbackup, Smtools, and Dtracetools. These are packages updated frequently in which anyone can install and use immediately to reap the benefits and make your life easier.” - Derek Crudgington, Joyent
Advantages of SmartOS and KVM in JPC - “One of the primary reasons for working in the Joyent Public Cloud is the flexible and performant architecture. The Joyent Public Cloud runs SmartOS as a hypervisor and supports a range of guest operating systems in the same cloud due to the support of KVM (various flavors of Linux, and Windows). The choice between deploying a SmartMachine (SmartOS VM) or a KVM (Linux or Windows VM) generally centers around preference or dependencies that necessarily tilt the decision in a specific direction. However, before deploying, you should consider some key differences between the two.” – Jason Davis, Joyent
Setting up Samba on SmartOS – “A frequent question on #smartos IRC is how to set up SmartOS as a file server. Due to the architecture of SmartOS and its focus on virtualisation, this isn’t as easy as on other systems, and some parts are simply not supported at this time (e.g. NFS). This guide, therefore, is a simple way to get Samba up and running so that you can at least use a SmartOS machine as a file server, even if it’s perhaps not the protocol you would initially choose.” – Jonathan Perkin, Joyent
Install SmartOS and keep your existing pool - “[SmartOS is] great as an all-in-one storage and virtualization server, despite only being branded as the latter. Maybe you’ve been using ESXi, Nexenta CP/NexentaStor, or OpenIndiana to fill this role (or even a combination of both on separate machines), but I assure you that it’s possible to have your cake and eat it too.”