Can anyone point to recommended hardware for this software? Solaris-family OS's do not have the same level of hardware support that the more popular operating systems enjoy.

I would like to see an update to this discussion, 'Hardware Recommendation -- What Do Joyent and Others Run In Production?'¹ from Feb'2013:

The ditches on either side of the road through the land of hardware are steep and home to manifold ferocious beasts. Stray from this golden path at your peril.

¹ http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/2013/02/sort/ti...

For what Joyent uses in production, see http://eng.joyent.com/manufacturing/. For what's known to be compatible, see http://illumos.org/hcl/.

If people have questions, several of us Joyent engineers are watching this thread, so fire away. We're also hanging out in #smartos and #manta on freenode.

Wow! This is so unexpected.

Congratulations (and thanks!) to all the people who made this possible. I am in your debt.

The list of open sourced repos, for those interested, is here: https://gist.github.com/trentm/ce1b6a9db28665f57413

Wow. It is a huge amount of work to take a product like manta and open source it. This is great work by Joyent and a testament to their commitment to open source.

cool. I poked around, but couldn't see how this supports docker containers at the moment. I assume that at least for now it just runs KVM linux vms that can run docker?

Or is there a different way this is handled?

Not sure what in the announcement you are referring to. The only thing it says about Docker is that it has brought move visibility to OS-virtualization.

But, Joyent is infact working on docker support for SmartOS. They have revived an old Solaris feature called LX-branded zones that allows running linux binaries directly in SmartOS. Bryan Cantrill gave a talk on it at SurgeConf this year:

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrfD3pC0VSs slides: http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx

Sorry if anything was unclear -- while OS-based virtualization is very core to SDC, there's nothing specific to Docker at the moment. That said, that's definitely trying to make SDC a good fit for production Docker deployments -- and if you want a sneak peek as to some of the technological underpinnings, see our work on LX branded zones in SmartOS.[1] Expect a lot more there in the coming weeks and months; all of our work there has been (and will be!) done in the open.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx

Cool. Are there any links to the project source for the LX branded zones work?

Yes, sorry -- it's all open, and lives in SmartOS, which doesn't necessarily have the most intuitive repo name:

http://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent

If you look at the commit log, you'll see this is a very active area of development. Also, you can find us in #smartos on Freenode if you have specific questions.

These are Solaris containers / zones, which as you pointed out can host a full KVM Linux (which can in turn host docker containers).

Someday docker may be extended to support Solaris natively, the same way Microsoft has committed to adding support for Windows.

opensourcing sdc is great, but opening up manta for everyone is huge! Thanks!