NixOS Linux 17.03 Installation with KDE Plasma 5 on VMware Workstation

Triton SmartOS Installation, Configuration and Review on VMware

This tutorial shows how to install and review SmartOS on VMware Workstation/Player step by step. It also helps for installing SmartOS on physical computer or bare-metal server. We'll also create and configure Pool and Zone. Finally we'll install Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Server on SmartOS.

Triton SmartOS Installation Steps:

1. Download Triton SmartOS ISO
2. Create Virtual Machine on VMware Workstation/Player
3. Start SmartOS Installation
4. Create Mirrored (RAID 1) ZFS Pool
5. Create Ubuntu 16.04 Virtual Machine in SmartOS
6. Install Ubuntu 16.04 VM in SmartOS

Installing and Configuring Triton SmartOS and Review on VMware

What is Triton SmartOS?

SmartOS is a free and open-source SVR4 hypervisor, based on the UNIX operating system that combines OpenSolaris technology with Linux's KVM virtualization. Its core kernel contributed to illumos project. It features several technologies: Crossbow, DTrace, KVM, ZFS, and Zones. SmartOS is designed to be particularly suitable for building clouds and generating appliances. SmartOS is an in-memory operating system and boots directly into random access memory.

It supports various boot mechanisms such as booting off of USB thumb-drive, ISO Image, or over the network via PXE boot. One of the many benefits of employing this boot mechanism is that operating system upgrades are trivial, simply requiring a reboot off of a newer SmartOS image version.
SmartOS Website: https://www.joyent.com/smartos

Triton SmartOS Key Features

Triton SmartOS leverages Zones, a hardened container runtime environment that does not depend upon VM hosts for security. Patented resource protections insulate containers from noisy neighbors and ensure that each container gets its fair share of I/O.

Triton SmartOS eliminates the complexities associated with VM host dependent solutions. Built-in networking offers each container one or more network interfaces, so each container has a full IP stack and is a full peer on the network, eliminating port conflicts and making network management easy.

Triton SmartOS leverages ZFS to free container storage from VM host dependencies. ZFS storage virtualization makes secure storage management easy, while maximizing performance. ZFS’ flexible provisioning, copy-on-write, and data integrity checking are an ideal match for containers, while advanced caching techniques make even spinning disks perform as fast as SSDs.

By eliminating layers of virtualization and running containers directly on bare metal, applications enjoy the highest possible performance. And, because you are running on OS virtualized containers, you can easily scale your applications and infrastructure up and down.

Hope you found this Triton SmartOS installation, configuration and review tutorial helpful and informative. Please consider sharing it. Your feedback and questions are welcome!