SmartOS icon
SmartOS icon

SmartOS

SmartOS is a hypervisor lean enough to run entirely in memory, powerful enough to run as much as you want to throw at it. Provisioning is blindingly fast, thanks to zones and ZFS file system creation.

SmartOS screenshot 1

Cost / License

  • Free
  • Open Source

Application type

Platforms

  • Self-Hosted
SmartOS alternatives  
19likes
19alternatives
0articles

Features

Properties

  1.  Lightweight

Features

  1.  Ad-free
  2.  Rolling Release
  3.  Container Virtualization
  4.  No Tracking
  5.  Command line interface
  6.  Virtualization
  7.  Hypervisor

 Tags

SmartOS News & Activities

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Recent activities

  • walkingstick liked SmartOS
  • Sylve icon
    POX added SmartOS as alternative to Sylve
  • Bushel icon
    POX added SmartOS as alternative to Bushel
  • thejfex liked SmartOS

SmartOS information

AlternativeTo Categories

OS & Utilities, Network & Admin, System & Hardware

GitHub repository

  •  1,683 Stars
  •  250 Forks
  •  361 Open Issues
  •   Updated  
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SmartOS was added to AlternativeTo by Jonathan Dumont on and this page was last updated .
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What is SmartOS?

SmartOS is a specialized Type 1 Hypervisor platform based on Illumos. It supports two types of virtualization:

OS Virtual Machines (Zones): A light-weight virtualization solution offering a complete and secure userland environment on a single global kernel, offering true bare metal performance and all the features Illumos has, namely dynamic introspection via DTrace KVM Virtual Machines: A full virtualization solution for running a variety of guest OS's including Linux, Windows, *BSD, Plan9 and more

SmartOS is a "live OS", it is always booted via PXE, ISO, or USB Key and runs entirely from memory, allowing the local disks to be used entirely for hosting virtual machines without wasting disks for the root OS. This architecture has a variety of advantages including increased security, no need for patching, fast upgrades and recovery.

Virtualization in SmartOS builds on top of the foundational Illumos technologies inherited from OpenSolaris, namely:

  • ZFS for storage virtualization
  • Crossbow (dladm) for network virtualization
  • Zones for virtualization and containment
  • DTrace for introspection
  • SMF for service management
  • RBAC/BSM for auditing and role based security etc.

These technologies are combined into a single operating system, providing an arbitrarily-observable, highly multi-tenant environment built on a reliable, enterprise-grade storage stack.