I'm on SmartOS

Since there were no entries I thought I'd contribute the fact that I'm happily running FusionPBX on it for years now.

Their hypervisor is probably the most effective one out there, well worth looking into. The Solaris developers were brilliant and have some amazing designs. SmartOS, for those who don't know, is a specialized Type 1 Hypervisor platform based on illumos. (https://wiki.smartos.org/) Which in turn branched from Sun Solaris when they went open source.

It is also well worth looking into ZFS and the whole storage design. SmartOS boots from a USB drive which means 100% of the drives are only used for whatever VMs I put on them, and being read only is very unlikely to be hacked.

I'm running FB on a KVM with a Debian 12 image generated by them. This basically ensures the bottom layer is properly talking to the KVM. It works like a normal Debian install with pkg manager, updates etc. working as expected. I've not run into anything that is broken as a result.

Of course the HW is a bigger than an average computer and works for me as I run a number of VMs for various things so adding one for FusionPBX is just better utilization of it. My server is an old Supermicro.

Sure. Once I realized what ZFS is and how it is the only* filesystem that is allowed to properly manage your data I was sold. Unlike others where which can only tell you that a file is corrupt ZFS can actually repair it as well.

Ever since I discovered it a number of years ago I use it on all computers that I can. You do need to have ECC on your RAM for it to work properly. Selling non-error correcting memory I think was made popular as a way to save money. In reality it was a really bad idea as corrupt data is easily more expensive than a few dollars paid out once. If you like data integrity there's nothing really like it.

Another key ingredient is you cannot use a controller with built-in RAID (hardware RAID) as ZFS must have direct control of the media.

SmartOS is a hypervisor meaning everything you run is running in a zone. The zone can run a few different ways and you choose the one that fits your needs the best. I'm not going to try to do a this-is-how SmartOS-works writeup but you should watch this video for a good intro by Allan Jude, here you can really see the vast number of unique and valuable features of ZFS:


I generally use Joyent, KVM or LX for my VMs.

I've never heard of only being able to use UDP since that is so far down the stack and really if you can do UDP you can do the others just as well. I used it 10 years ago and saw no such (really odd) limitation. Sounds more like a firewall block.

These days we have OpenZFS which is basically a way to get away from Oracle (current copyright owners) lawsuits.

Sun was this massive server company that also created an OS to go with it, Solaris. In 2000 they decided to open source it and in 2004(?) Oracle bought them because they wanted MySQL which Sun in turn had bought. Oracle closed all future development but the genie was already out of the box of course.

*I'm aware of another similar FS called btrfs, the original dev is in prison for murdering his girlfriend I think. One should be aware that ZFS was put together by a really exceptional group of devs working for the biggest server manufacturer in the world serving almost exclusively Fortune 500 companies. They could afford to hire the best. I can't imagine btrfs is anywhere as encompassing as ZFS.

In the previous post I shared an interview with Allan Jude, this one has more details going into reliability, security, sending datasets to other machines and interesting stories: