What you will need

  • An Intel CPU with VT-x  and EPT support. e.g. Core i3, i5, i7 or newer Xeon’s & Celerons (AMD is not supported yet). If you are not sure check on the Intel site and verify your cpu has support for both VT-x  and EPT.
  • A USB Flash Drive ( 1GB will do just fine)
  • A Hard drive for your ZFS zones Virtual Machine (I recommend at least 2 drives for a mirror)
  • A couple of ISO images for KVM virtual machine setups e.g. Centos, Freebsd, etc
  • Internet Access to download Joyent OS shared Kernel templates.

 Lets Get Started

1) Download the lastest USB image from the Joyent site.

2) Burn the image to your USB flash drive – Instructions Here

3) Boot your computer off the USB Drive – choose “Live- 64-Bit Text” menu option.

4) If all goes well you will now be on the configuration screen. If you got a message about no KVM support, stop here, go buy yourself a Core i3, i5, or i7 and come back to point 4 when done.;-)

5) Continue with the configuration and Configure your network settings either dhcp or static. Once completed you will be asked to select the disks to be used for your storage pool.

I selected all 5 disks for the storage pool, by specifying all the disks separated by spaces e.g.

c0t0d0 c0t2d0 c0t3d0 c0t4d0 c0t5d0

6) Create a root password. This root password will be be stored and will survive USB reboots, so store it in a safe place. Verify your configuration and select “no” when asked if you would like edit the final configuration file.

7) The next step will create your storage pools and erase the contents of the disks. Select (y)

Once the storage pool has been created the SmartOS node will reboot. Upon reboot SmartOS will detect that there is a valid storage pool called “zones” that has been created and will boot to the login prompt.

Lets Login as root, and your SmartOS machine is ready to rock and roll! You should now have networking up and running and can  ssh into your SmartOS node to manage it. Lets have a look at our new SmartOS Server Node.

root@08-00-27-28-e8-75 ~]# zpool status
pool: zones
state: ONLINE
scan: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
zones ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t4d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t5d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors

As you can see by default SmartOS has created 1 raidz pool with the 5 disks I specified during the creation process. This pool is called “zones” and all our Virtual machines and configuration data will be stored in the “zones” pool.

[root@08-00-27-28-e8-75 ~]# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
zones 1.24G 2.64G 553K /zones
zones/config 54.3K 2.64G 54.3K legacy
zones/cores 46.3K 2.64G 46.3K /zones/global/cores
zones/dump 208M 2.64G 208M -
zones/opt 46.3K 2.64G 46.3K legacy
zones/swap 1.03G 3.68G 25.6K -
zones/usbkey 146K 2.64G 146K legacy
zones/var 2.09M 2.64G 2.09M legacy

In the next article we will continue with creation of Virtual machines as well as the use of the built in commands to manage and perform tasks in SmartOS.

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