[OpenIndiana-discuss] OpenIndiana Intro questions

[Alexander Pyhalov]

On 10/23/17 06:21 PM, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> Greetings All,
> 
> I have recently been playing around a little with SmartOS for running
> containers and hypervizing VM's for which it seems to work pretty well, and
> wanted to also investigate the desktop side of things as well so I hope
> that someone on the list will answer a few rudimentary questions to get me
> going with my OI explorations.
> 
> I know that SmartOS can be a hypervisor to run the Linux, and Windows OS's
> as VM's in zones, but I was wondering if OpenIndiana was able to hypervize
> these OS's as well?

Yes, it can. illumos-kvm is not a part of illumos-gate, but is a 
separate codebase, developed mainly by Joyent. We compile and deliver 
it, but KVM benefits from several system features (the one which comes 
to my mind is VND), which are available in SmartOS, but not in other 
distributions (AFAIK). OI can run KVM guests on modern Intel hardware, 
but SmartOS can be more efficient, for example, in network virtualization.
-- 
Best regards,
Alexander Pyhalov,
system administrator of Southern Federal University IT department