Publicly released in April 2012, OmniOS is a continuation of the OpenSolaris legacy and aims to address the longstanding issues that occurred when Oracle discontinued open development of the operating system. OmniOS builds on Illumos to make a complete OS. It is a cost-effective and open alternative to Oracle Solaris 11.
This new release represents the best-available version of OmniOS for production deployments.
Key new features include:
1. Multiple ZFS Enhancements: OmniTI has added support for ZFS feature flags which is a new ZFS pool format that facilitates portability of zpools among Illumos distributions. This helps users avoid vendor lock in and is a feature only found in Illumos-based operating systems. We have also integrated ZFS I/O throttling capabilities, recently developed by Joyent. ZFS I/O throttling provides more consistent I/O latency to competing zones, and is now available in OmniOS.
2. Kayak Network Installer: Kayak now features a richer tool set in the mini-root environment, allowing administrators to better diagnose and correct issues encountered during network installations.
3. Updated DTrace Functionality: The dynamic tracing framework now supports time-ordered output (-x temporal), making results easier to understand on multi-processor systems.
4. Improved Out-of-Band Management Support: This OmniOS release includes new support for Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) devices for improved out-of-band management configuration on supported hardware. Administrators may now configure local IPMI devices from within OmniOS. Previous releases were limited to LAN connections.
OmniOS has been well received by the Open Source community since our launch last spring and our customers have experienced great results. This new version enhances the stability and security of OmniOS, giving customers even more flexibility in a stable robust environment. OmniOS fills a need in the post-Solaris world for a lightweight installation focused on traditional enterprise environments as well as cloud deployments.
~ Theo Schlossnagle, CEO, OmniTI
The newest version of OmniOS is immediately available for download at omnios.omniti.com. In addition, the new stable version has also been made available for Amazon Web Service (AWS) users as a public Amazon Machine Image (AMI), for those deploying in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud, designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. OmniOS brings the power of ZFS and DTrace to developers working in this environment.
OmniTI uses OmniOS for customer applications, and is making it generally available to the Solaris community for free with the intention that it becomes a standard platform for open source development. In addition to the growing open source community around OmniOS, OmniTI also offers more traditional commercial support.