[OpenIndiana-discuss] To the OmniOS, OI and SmartOS community

Thu May 18 16:31:09 UTC 2017

Hello Guenther

I would pretty much suggest using OpenIndiana to develop solutions like 
napp-it on top of.

Main reason being that appart from certain vlan taging and lx zone 
features we have all the technical bells ans whistels that OmniOs and 
SmartOS have. We just have some different tools. We use the ones Solaris 
used and don't have high level wrappers like vmadm.

If you want to use it to base your napp-it I definately would support 
you with what I know about the distribution. I could tell you about the 
Image creation system and other stuff. And I'm sure that others would 
help out with insights aswell.

What would you need from a Distribution to build your Application on 
top? Would be interesting to know.

---
Greetings
Till

On 15.05.2017 13:58, Guenther Alka wrote:
> *Its time to consider pla**n**B/C ??*
> to: omnios-discuss, openindiana-discuss, smartos-discuss
> 
> The announcement of OmniTi to cancel OmniOS from now to then is a real 
> disaster not only for OmniOS users but for the whole Illumos platform. 
> Many users who want a free Solaris based OS especially in production 
> environments selected OmniOS as their preferred Illumos platform mainly 
> with use cases storage and general server applications.
> 
> The reasons:*OmniOS=**Up to date Illumos*
> + commercial support option (although way too expensive)
> + own developments like LX zones integration from SmartOS or drivers
> + stables/long term stables with very experienced full time staff 
> (thanks to Dan and Dale again)
> 
> As OmniTi has released a new stable 151022, I/we have some time maybe to 
> the end of the year unless OmniOS is out of sync with Illumos in a non 
> tolerable amount.  Bugfixes of serious problems may be the case until 
> then (hope so).
> 
> What are the/my options
> 
> 
> *Plan A*
> Hope for a continuation of OmniOS as a well maintained 
> community/commercial project with further development, ongoing stables 
> and bugfixes optionally with some paid contributions under the umbrella 
> of a firm or at least with some experienced members that were already 
> resonsible for OmniOS or an Illumos distribution and that can be trusted 
> for next years.
> 
> While I hope for this, I doubt that this is a serious option. I switched 
> from OpenIndiana to OmniOS three years ago as the OI community was too 
> weak and development nearly stalled at that time. I am not interested in 
> a new weak OmniOS community for a distribution that should be used as a 
> production system. The OmniOS community will be propably too small 
> forever as we already have the Illumos community project OpenIndiana 
> nearly identical to OmniOS from distribution, features and use cases. 
> And a very important thing: The brand OmniOS has already a very bad name 
> as a dead/failed project in the press mostly affecting Illumos as well.
> 
> 
> *Plan B*
> OpenIndiana is a quite established community project for an up to date 
> Illumos distribution. I would say its nearly identical to OmniOS beside 
> the missing LX improvements from OmniOS but with an additional GUI 
> option. I hope to see LX zones upstreamed to Illumos. OpenIndiana 
> currently offers a rolling development of newest Illumos bits with 
> snapshots every 6 months but without an additional stable repository 
> with backported security fixes. Every update give you the newest Illumos 
> fixes and features but also the newest bugs (ongoing dev, unstable).
> 
> If OmniOS has to become a community project, I undoubtly would prefer a 
> merge of the two distributions up from next releases. OpenIndiana with a 
> stable repo for every snapshot and with a repo as development path would 
> give me what was the main advantage of OmniOS beside commercial support. 
> Access to such a stable repo optionally under an OmniOS brand may be 
> even a paid (if affordable) option. Such a merge would strengthen 
> Illumos at first place but also free OpenSource distributions like 
> OmniOS and OpenIndiana.
> 
> 
> *Plan C*
> There is another free Illumos distribution with an enterprise background 
> suited for datacenter use: SmartOS. It even adds unique Cloud and 
> virtualisation features like KVM, Solaris zones, Linux zones and Docker 
> support. As it is running from RAM with everything important on a 
> datapool it is a very stable/ easy recoverable option but it lacks some 
> features in the global zone that are required for a storage server.  An 
> additional plus is the pkgin repo with lots of supported long term 
> stable services.
> 
> Using SmartOS would require a mechanism to allow storage services like 
> SSH, Crossbow, iSCSI, NFS and SMB on the global zone with an option to 
> save/restore settings from a datapool to be persistent. To be honest, a 
> SmartOS that is capable to act as a storage appliance would be my dream 
> option, at least as an additional option. This would require that 
> SmartOS is not actively hindering this or preferable is helping to 
> implement a save/restore option for global zone settings&features.
> 
> 
> *Discuss*
> But whatever option is coming, end the Illumos fragmentation for the 
> sake of one strong free community distribution with a solid number of 
> contributors and one freely available with a commercial background like 
> SmartOS/ Samsung owned.
> 
> 
> Any comments from OmniOS, OI, SmartOS (omnios-discuss, 
> openindiana-discuss, smartos-discuss) communities?
> I have send this to all three lists, so optionally answer all lists
> 
> 
> best regards
> 
> 
> Gea/ napp-it.org
> 
> 
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