mlari: thank you, you've confirmed my suspicion. I've started to look for some illumos, SmartOS and OpenSolaris resources too

I found the OpenSolaris Bible for 5 USD, not bad

It takes some time to get acquainted with the ecosystem, learn which concepts there are, how far back they go and thus which references are valuable

I've done mostly networking (proprietary NOS'es), Windows and VMware. With some amount of Linux and a little bit of BSD

I came to BSD after I became disillusioned with Linux complexity, looking for a VM and container platform to stick with

But then I learned the spirit of Solaris is still alive and kicking and became interested in that

I'll probably end up with a mix, since I'm interested in x86 packet forwarding too (things like DPDK, VPP)

As far as I've gleaned to this moment, that type of high performance stuff hasn't had any recent attention in illumos

jaap: a lot of the core bits: ZFS, dtrace, SMF go back to solaris 10, although there have been improvements since then, and things have diverged since Oracle got their mitts on things.

things like bhyve are newer, but I think there's some cross over with FreeBSD with that (I've not yet played with it)

you'll also find some helpful people on here and some of the other related channels

Could I run OmniOS on a generic VPS host like Hetzner? I've heard of people using the Linux rescue mode to get BSD's on there

I've seen the AWS image, but I'm trying to prevent using additional AWS services

Ideally I'd get an OmniOS VPS running somewhere as a jump host, seems like a good use case to start out with

jaap: if they let you upload your own boot image you can do it.

(there may be other ways to get it loaded but that's likely to be the most straightforward)

Or use spare hardware. Lots of extra x86_64 hardware on the market with Win10 going EOL soon.

Haven't tried Hetzner personally (I know AWS, Digital Ocean, Vultr, Netcup all work fine) but they do offer a custom image install from ISO option.

Although if I can, I do an iPXE boot, as the ipxe image is so much smaller and easier to manage

jayjwa: really depends depending on why you want the server. (wanting a machine in a distinct power/network failure domain from your basement, for one).

(The only problem is if it decides to reset the VNC console just at the moment you need to press ctrl-b or whatever you need to break into the boot.)