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So, OpenIndiana?

If btrfs has so many issues, I wonder why Docker doesn't have a deployment on Illumos. or SmartOS.

I would think that Docker enthusiasm would be damped by a beta filesystem and (the lack of) verifiable security in package content.

Actually, the illumos codebase, on which OpenIndiana is based, is far, far from dead.

But the frontpage of the OpenIndiana site has had a fork stuck in it for two years. There is some activity in the wiki, but if you only looked at the front page all you would see would be a time machine talking about "the latest" 2013 release, and a download link to same. There is no excuse for this. You could get the front page updated at the cost of buying a high school kid a couple of pizzas.

The frontpage of the IllumOS site just redirects you to a wiki which claims it has been "last updated" in 2013, though there is clear 2015 content. The blog link takes you to, again, 2013. This isn't quite as egregious, given that IllumOS, as far as I can figure out, isn't really a distro at all. It is a codebase feeding a number of distros.

I won't lower myself to the "Netcraft confirms" quote, but all this doesn't look healthy or encouraging at all.

I've got a Dell T410 I bought second hand. I've got 6x1TB WD Black SATA drives attached to a PERC5 in RAID 6. It's got 48GB of RAM and dual Xeon E5504s. It's running Hyper-V 2012R2, and hosts my MS home lab for testing, licensed through the now defunct Technet program. The MS lab is all 2012R2 and consists of an Exchange 2013 server, 2 DCs, and a CA. I use this mostly for testing stuff I'm going to do at work, as well as learning Windows garbage I wouldn't normally get to.

I've also got 8 Linux VMs running on it. 6 are running Ubuntu 14.04, one is running Debian Wheezy and one is running Debian Sid. The 6 Ubuntu boxes run my internet based PVR so that I don't have to deal with building a proper PVR to record my totally current active cable service; internet based Blu-Ray ripper so that I don't have to actually rip the discs I buy all the time; Plex Media Server to connect the aforementioned backups to my Chromecast/mobile devices/whatever; SABNzb to actually perform the backups; a custom WordPress installation running SupportPress so that my wife and roommate can submit tickets to remind me to fix the Roomba; a BitTorrent Sync box so that I don't need to deal with Dropbox. The Wheezy box is a Sendmail server for sending mail and the Sid box is one that I use to mess around with and test Linux compatibility with some Python stuff I have.

I've got a file server which has been running OpenIndiana, but I had to move that back to Ubuntu because OI doesn't currently support my motherboard. It's got an 80GB Intel 520 SSD as the OS drive, and a janky ZFS setup which works well enough for home use. The zpools are setup across 3 RAIDZ pools, each cnsists of a 4x1TB, 4x2TB or 4x3TB RAIDZ array. Each array also has a 20GB slice of a 120GB Vertex 3 as cache drives, with the last slice going to the smallest zpool as a slog. The smallest zpool gets the slog since it's running dedup as it houses backups for the Hyper-V box, my desktop and laptop and my wife and roommate's computers. It's got an i3 and 32GB of ECC RAM.

I'm currently in the process of waiting for a server to configure off-site replication of all my important/irreplaceable data to a hosted server through So You Start, formerly OVH. $42 a month for 2TB of off-site storage seems like a pretty great deal to me. It'll be running FreeBSD I suppose, since they don't offer Solaris.

We need a free desktop OS. Linux is the only contender.

Is that so?

ZoL is why I moved to OpenIndiana. The performance was terrible, even without dedupe or compression turned on I was getting maybe 10MB/sec writes. Same pool under OI runs at an appropriate 120MB/sec, no changes other than OS. Mind you, this was over a year ago, so maybe they've fixed the performance issues.

With the departure of the lead OI dev, I may have to start looking for a new ZFS capable OS.

One funny thing about OpenIndiana - it's fully supported on x86/x64, but not on Sun's own SPARC servers. So ironically, if one wants ZFS and DTrace support on SPARC, one is probably better off going w/ FreeBSD 9, rather than OpenIndiana.

I used to have very high expectation of OpenSolaris after Ian Murdock became the head of the project... But then Oracle came and destroyed all my hopes.

Good news! Your high expectations and hopes are alive and well at the [open] crossroads of America . They're also welcome at freenode on #openindiana.

Yep, put a nail in OpenSolaris' coffin. Instead, I use and recommend OpenIndiana and NexentaStor (or Nexenta's community edition if you prefer).

OpenSolaris is Dead. Long live http://openindiana.org//

https://www.illumos.org/ http://openindiana.org/ http://smartos.org/ http://www.nexenta.org/

I used to run Ubuntu Server with with one mdadm RAID5 array and one ZFS array using ZFS Native pool in RAIDZ1 as my file server. But I started running out of space in the RAID5 array, and was having massive problems with the ZFS pool under high IO (complete system lockups, deadlocks while flushing the write cache which killed SMB and NFS); 5Kb/sec writes and at most 5MB/sec reads after an initial 5-60 second _normal_ performance period.

I moved to OpenIndiana because I really like the long term and extensible benefits that ZFS offers, and the problems I was having seemed to only be happening to Linux users.

ZFS's built in, block-level data de-duplication means significant savings on episodic content. I'm currently running at 4% de-duplicated data. While 4% savings may not sound like much, I've got 4.5TB of TV shows that I'm storing in x264, and that yields a savings of around 100GB. I know that until recently, storage was dirt cheap, but even still, 100GB is nothing to scoff at. I've debated enabling the built-in compression, but I don't think I want to take the resource hit as my wife has recently started streaming things to her laptop while myself or our roommate are watching things on our respective computers.

Additionally, the ease of expanding and repairing my ZFS pool has made replacing hardware less time consuming, and has significantly lowered the performance hit while repairing the 'array'. Replacing a hard drive was dead simple with ZFS, and not nearly as nerve racking as the times I had to do so with my MDADM array. Additionally, I was still able to pull ~30MB/sec off the drives over SMB shares while the array was rebuilding. Writes also were similar over the network. Raw internal performance saw a significant hit, but moving things between ZFS file systems isn't something that needs to be done while rebuilding; using the media content is for my household.

Everything is running over Gigabit on cat5e with one Linksys 610N running DDWRT acting as a gigabit switch in my 'server room' (an uninsulated sunroom that's too hot to use in the summer and too cold to use in the winter), one crappy D-Link 5 port Gb switch , one Linksys e4200 acting as an AP and main switch, and an old Linksys WRT54GL running DD-WRT as my router and firewall. Recabling to Cat6 is extra expense for no practical gain. You're going to need it when you upgrade to 10GigE, but that's a few years away. By the time you start using 10GigE, Cat6 will be as cheap as 5E is now, and you still may not even see significant need to move to it.

Hardware wise, I'm running a system based on this motherboard, with 8GB RAM, this NIC, and this SATA controller, with a 80+Platinum certified power supply that I can't find a link to right now.

Solaris is installed on a Intel 320 80GB SSD, with 8GB dedicated as log space for my ZFS pool, and 40GB dedicated for cache space. I have one ZFS pool made up of two RAIDZ1 arrays. The first array is made up of 4 2TB WD Caviar Black (WD2001FASS) drives, and is attached to the SATA ports on my motherboard. The second array is made of 4 1TB WD Green drives attached to the LSI card.

Internal file moves average out at around 250MB sec for anything under 2GB, 800MB/sec for files larger than between 2GB and 7GB, and about 400MB/sec for anything over 7GB. Network writes are about 80MB/sec between servers, and about 40 max from elsewhere. which I attribute to the D-Link. Reads are also around 80MB/sec. I've been able to run 4 simultaneous 1080P streams without anyone complaining about stuttering, or excessive buffering at the start.

The system idles at around 40Watts, and under load pulls about 100. These numbers may be way off, because I honestly have no idea about how electricity

I don't know where people are getting this $1000/socket bullsh*t. Maybe that's some ridiculous list price, but unless you're a moron, you won't pay anywhere close to that for full HW and OS support on Sun/Oracle hardware.

The $1000/socket/year is straight off of Oracle's website. As a small shop, Oracle hasn't been willing to cut us a deal or negotiate, and only offers us what's on their website. Too bad, I used to use and really like OpenSolaris.

Since the acquisition I had somewhat lost hope in Solaris with Oracle as the overlord, however, I've recently found OpenIndiana. It looks very promising!

Yeah, but it was forked just in time before Oracle pulled the plug. You might want to check out OpenIndiana

Generally, I agree... but VirtualBox is only a few features away from competing.

At *HOME*, I run VBox on my OpenSolaris box... four SATA drives in Raid-Z2... phpVirtualBox to manage...

I admire your pluck. And I cried when it left, but OpenSolaris is dead. Long live OpenIndiana.

Again, not true. You cannot 'just use the xen 4.1 hypervisor'. You seem to be completely ignorant of how much work there is in adding dom0 support in a kernel which is fortunate for you only. And the last opensolaris in august 2010 did not have dom0 and nor does openindiana. [1][2][3]

[1] https://www.illumos.org/boards/1/topics/561
[2] http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/7.+Virtualization
[3] http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=134657

Also if the article I linked to and the gamers I worked for are any indication SSDs don't "fail gracefully" or give you plenty of advanced warning like HDDs do. With every HDD I've had fail short of being dropped there was plenty of time to get the data off as SMART gave warning long before the point of no return. With both of the gamers it was "flip the switch and its gone" no warning at all.

I'd agree - don't use SSDs to store important data, or, if you feel that you must, be obsessive about backing it up. My own experience with SSDs have been mixed. I've used them in two OpenSolaris (actually now OpenIndiana) systems. They were identical OCZ Vertex 20GB drives, used for ZFS L2ARC (caching). One of them failed in operation without warning after about a year in service, and the other is still working after a similar amount of time, but it will undoubtedly fail at any moment. Since the fried SSD was a cache, there was no data loss, but it still gives me pause to think of using one as a main drive.

The bad drive is completely dead; it is not even detected during POST. It has been replaced by a 60GB Samsung. I'm through with OCZ, not just for the drive, but I had one of their 700W power supplies go "pop" on me last November (shortly after the warranty expired).

For those who are looking for a free and community driven alternative distribution of Solaris Express (which will soon be based on Illumos) without such restrictions check out the OpenIndiana distribution:

http://openindiana.org/
http://openindiana.org/download/
http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/OpenIndiana+Wiki+Home

For those who are looking for a free and community driven alternative distribution of Solaris Express (which will soon be based on Illumos) without such restrictions check out the OpenIndiana distribution:

http://openindiana.org/
http://openindiana.org/download/
http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/OpenIndiana+Wiki+Home

For those who are looking for a free and community driven alternative distribution of Solaris Express (which will soon be based on Illumos) without such restrictions check out the OpenIndiana distribution:

http://openindiana.org/
http://openindiana.org/download/
http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/OpenIndiana+Wiki+Home

Wake me when these features are available in OpenIndiana and Nexenta Core. I'll not be trapped investing more time in platforms where ``I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.''