SmartOS is an Illumos-derived distro developed by Joyent as the base OS for their cloud. This presentation at illumos Day focuses on the operating system virtualization capabilities of SmartOS and details the extensive enhancements made to the OS, based on real-world production experience deploying SmartOS in the Joyent cloud.

For all those who asked: “Hey! Where can I get that cool SmartOS coffee mug?” – now you can order it yourself!

Enhanced OS Virtualization for the Cloud – Jerry Jelinek at illumos Day (video)

Our DTrace scripts for NFS server, ZFS, and iSCSI initiator monitoring – “ I’ve built up a collection of DTrace scripts for monitoring and reporting on our fileserver environment, where we use NFS v3 on top of ZFS on top of iSCSI.” - Chris Siebenmann

SmartOS Command Line Fu - “SmartOS is extremely powerful. A lot of its power can be unleashed and understood by familiarising ourselves with some of the inherent unix commands underpinning its solid foundation. Thankfully the folks at Joyent have eased this learning curve for us considerably by pre-bundling some utilities in SmartOS. These utilities, leverage the power of Dtrace, ZFS, Zones, virtual networking (Crossbow) and other unix utilities and makes them accessible to us via easy to run scripts.” – (We couldn’t have said it better ourselves!) - Mark Slatem aka #Trentster – also now on the SmartOS wiki, thanks Mark and Jason!

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

NodeStack Online Conference Recap - This online conference included “an explanation by Bryan Cantrill on why SmartOS is the way to instrument and debug Node.js applications in production.” Videos available here (registration required).

This is just a snippet from SVLUG‘s Comparative Operating Systems Discussion panel on current open source Unix systems, in which Bryan Cantrill was a speaker, along with Kevin Dankwardt of K Computing representing Linux, Josh Paetzel, Director of IT at IxSystems, Inc. for FreeBSD, and Charles Forsyth, Technical Director and Co-Founder at Vita Nuova for Plan 9.

I do plan to upload the entire two hours, just need to find a window of time in which the upload can be completed!

Free to redistribute under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

Installing

You can run ‘./bin/build-image’ which will create an ISO, ZIP and TAR archives for the tools. The tools include both the Windows and Linux tools. The reason they are created this way is so you can use an ISO to load Windows drivers during install time, and a tarball or zipfile after a system is up and running.

Windows

The windows directory contains signed VirtIO drivers, as well as some scripts and binaries that are used to retrieve metadata from the metadata API. In addition, sample sysprep files are provided that you can use to create your own windows images.

Linux

The linux directory contains the ‘mdata-get’ tool, as well as several other scripts for formatting a secondary disk, setting up networking, and fetching user-scripts. There is also a ‘prepare-image’ tool that is used to clean up a machine prior to turning it into an image.

Trentster gives us:

A screencast of using SmartOS covering:

-Creating a new KVM Virtual Machine
-Creating and using JSON payloads
-Installing OS from ISO in ZFS zone
-Retrieving vnc settings and connecting to VNC console
-FreeBSD 9 installation
-Cloning a New VM from an existing VM base zone image
-Deploying multiple new VM’s from clone

Thank you, Trentster!

Robert Mustacchi’s talk at SCALE 10x. An excellent introduction to what SmartOS is and why it’s better.

Want to learn more? Come meet Robert at the Joyent Cloud Meetup/Office Hours Jan 31. 5-7 pm. Beer and pizza provided!

60 minutes (playlist of 5 parts)

slides

(read the rest on Joyeur)

Joyent VP of Engineering Bryan Cantrill speaks at the KVM Forum, Aug 15, 2011.

Slides

Download in 1080p, 720p, or 360p.

Bryan Cantrill’s webinar of August 23, 2011.

slides (PDF)

Q&A (text)