Moving from a Synology NAS storage solution to a white box All-in-One server, I wanted an operating system that had mature support for ZFS Sun Microsystem’s Zetta File System, which narrowed choices down to OpenSolaris derivatives (OpenIndiana, Illumos, OmniOS) or FreeBSD (though the ZFS-on-Linux port is getting there).

I have 15 years experience with Linux, but am an absolute noob on Solaris. I knew I wanted an easy-to-use web-interface for administering the storage part of the server, and a lot of people are really happy with napp-it by Günther Alka (AKA gea), and the preferred OS for napp-it was OmniOS. The fact that OmniOS has a JeOS (just enough OS) approach and that Theo Schlossnagle (founder of OmniTI) comes across as someone who knows his sh*t made the choice easy.

The main features of OmniOS are:

• ZFS
  • Unmatched data integrity (checksums protect against data degradation)
  • Very cheap snapshots (due to copy-on-write nature of ZFS)
  • Integrated NFS and SMB sharing
  • Support for raw volumes (to host virtual machines)
  • Consistent and easy backup (via snapshots)
  • Storage scalability matching my needs (3-way mirror VDEVs)
• Crossbow (network virtualization)
• Zones
  • Secure isolation of services with zero overhead
• QEMU/KVM support
  • Virtual Machines

I went with r151006 which was the Long-Tail Support (LTS) at the time (April 2014). With respect to drivers there were no issues with the hardware I had, but driver support was a bit behind something like e.g. Linux (e.g. r151006 did not have support for LSI SAS3 HBAs).