Got SmartOS Droplets? Linux is great but what about diversity?

I’ve been working with SmartOS quite a bit for the last year…

SmartOS virtualisation is OS level … i.e. it doesn’t use hardware virtualisation. You can use it (via a KVM port) but don’t have to; and if you start SmartOS on a VM that won’t nest virtualisations it just says “can’t use KVM” and is fine otherwise.

To be frank, it’s awesome, but you have to be able to set up some weird stuff. In particular you need to be able to boot from a USB/CD/iPxe image even if there is a formatted disk attached. It’s this part that most of the service providers fall down on.

Note as well OmniOS has just picked up SmartOS’s Linux compatibility stuff and that (a) works a lot more like a traditional server and (b) runs on AWS.

Just stumbled across this old question, and wanted to note like @ryanpq hinted at in his comment, DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD in addition to our Linux offerings.

More generally if there is an operating system you’d like to see support for, you can open a request on UserVoice. We use it to help gauge user demand for different features, and the popularity of the request for a BSD option directly led to us offering FreeBSD.