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Welcome to the SmartOS Documentation. Here you'll find everything you need to get started using SmartOS and participating in the community. Information about what's new in recent releases can be found in the SmartOS Changelog.
Quick Start¶
Not sure where to begin? Try the SmartOS Quick Start Guide!
SmartOS In a Nutshell¶
SmartOS is a specialized Type 1 Hypervisor platform based on illumos. It supports two types of virtualization:
OS Virtual Machines (Zones, Containers): 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
(Zones, Containers): 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 Hardware Virtual Machines (KVM, Bhyve): 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:
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