SmartOS icon
SmartOS icon

SmartOS

 16 likes

SmartOS is a hypervisor lean enough to run entirely in memory, powerful enough to run as much as you want to throw at it. Provisioning is blindingly fast, thanks to zones and ZFS file system creation.

SmartOS screenshot 1

License model

  • Free • Open Source

Application type

Country of Origin

  • US flagUnited States

Platforms

  • Self-Hosted
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  No rating
16likes
0comments
17alternatives
0news articles

Features

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Properties

  1.  Lightweight

Features

  1.  Ad-free
  2.  Command line interface
  3.  Rolling Release
  4.  Container Virtualization
  5.  No Tracking
  6.  Virtualization
  7.  Hypervisor

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SmartOS information

  • Developed by

    US flagMNX Solutions

  • Licensing

    Open Source and Free product.

  • Pricing

    One time purchase (perpetual license) that costs $0.

  • Written in

  • Alternatives

    17 alternatives listed

  • Supported Languages

    • English

AlternativeTo Categories

OS & Utilities, Network & Admin, System & Hardware

GitHub repository

  •  1,605 Stars
  •  253 Forks
  •  384 Open Issues
  •   Updated May 14, 2025 
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Our users have written 0 comments and reviews about SmartOS, and it has gotten 16 likes

SmartOS was added to AlternativeTo by Jonathan DUMONT on Apr 12, 2015 and this page was last updated Dec 2, 2022.
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What is SmartOS?

SmartOS is a specialized Type 1 Hypervisor platform based on Illumos. It supports two types of virtualization:

OS Virtual Machines (Zones): 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 KVM Virtual Machines: 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:

  • ZFS for storage virtualization
  • Crossbow (dladm) for network virtualization
  • Zones for virtualization and containment
  • DTrace for introspection
  • SMF for service management
  • RBAC/BSM for auditing and role based security etc.

These technologies are combined into a single operating system, providing an arbitrarily-observable, highly multi-tenant environment built on a reliable, enterprise-grade storage stack.

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