It's sitting out there but not "officially" announced. I am hoping it will be up by fosdem next weekend.

This is a community distro though.. not sure i would call it enterprise.

any idea when the enterprise version that will replace nexentastor enterprise might come out?

thinking early spring for the next version of nexentastor.

we have had alot of confusion between nexentastor and nexenta core... part of the reason we are creating illumian. Illumian is a free open source distro and nexentastor is our product with the tools for setting up a nas.

I guess I am confused too then :) I am using nexentacore right now - is that going to be a 'dead end' for me?

We are changing over to an illumos kernel. nexenta core was/is built on top of opensolaris. Opensolaris is a dead end and we worked diligently to get that code out into an open community to be used by everyone. We assisted in the creation of illumos. It is a live and vibrant community working on the solaris kernel and userland.

It had more than a year of contributions before we switched over so there are many differences. So we don't have a direct upgrade path to it.

To help people understand how much change is there, we have changed the name and location. Illumian will be a project within the illumos community and will have a life of it's own. We will use it as the core kernel to our product.

I understand about the new illumos kernel. What I am confused about is that previously, you had two distros based on the OpenSolaris kernel: nexentacore and nexentastor. Will that still be true with the new illumos/illumian thing? I'm fine with having to do a fresh install and re-import my pool - just trying to get a handle on whether the user interface will be nexentacore or nexentastor (or something yet different?)

no nexenta core will be coming to an end of life and be replaced by illumian.

nexentastor will continue with a new version number, 4.0.

the user interface is only on nexentastor. that is our value add.

Ah, so if I am understanding this: nexentacore => illumian (illumos kernel) nexentastor 3.x => nexentastor 4.0 (illumos kernel)

Is that correct? thanks for taking the time to clarify this :)

nexentacore = opensolaris kernel

illumian = illumos kernel

linda

Hi Linda,

This is my first post here, and my first attempt at becoming involved in an opensource project.

There is a tremendous amount of confusion on the internet about the different versions of OpenSolaris and its various forks. I am writer and administrator at a university, and I would like to help write and publicize articles/blog posts/etc that clarify the status of ZFS/Solaris project forks.

Do you think I could be useful in this regard?

Let me know.

Derek

I may have some details wrong since I've never tried to keep track of all these details until I'm looking for documentation so there may be others on the mailing lists more qualified to explain this but here's my best rough outline...

OpenSolaris and Solaris were/are put together as sets of core functionality called consolidations. The OS and Networking consolidation (aka ON) are the functional equivalent of a Linux kernel and a distribution's base package. That is, all driver and networking functionality along with a very minimal amount of startup scripts and user land commands to boot strap an OS. You may see "just enough OS" distributions that are similar. If I understand correctly, this is what illumos-gate has replicated.

That in turn has been used to build distributions such as Joyent's SmartOS, OpenIndiana (OI), and a small number of others. If I understand the discussion correctly, Illumian will be somewhere in between a jeOS and a minimal distribution -- that is, illumos-gate plus a number of userland tools and startup scripts and processes packaged with the Debian package manager. However, it'll be pulling source from the OpenIndiana tree for things that aren't in illumos-gate. So what we might end up with is something more like OpenIndiana's server install with similar functionality and binaries but upgrades and patches being managed by apt tools instead of IPS.

I'd recommend reading through the illumos and OI development mailing lists if you want a much longer description but I'm not sure if there has really been much attempt to document all of the consolidations out there as they tend to still be referred to by their project names from Sun; e.g. the virtualization stack is still often called Crossbow.

-Gary

Actually, the project page clarifies that illumian intends to be a full distro; http://www.illumos.org/projects/illumian