After 'orrible went all 'orrible on OpenSolaris, and after verifying that the "express" replacement edition was far from good enough, it was time for a replacement.
I tried Debian GNU/kFreeBSD for a while. It satisifed some of my needs for a home server, but not all. I'll consider it for use later, it was fun to have both Debian and ZFS.
The new home server runs SmartOS. SmartOS is a complete and utter joy to work with as a virtual hosting platform.
I have a tiny USB memory stick on the motherboard, that's the boot drive. To upgrade, I write a newer image to the USB memory stick, and reboot.
For storage and persistent configuration, I have 6 3TB disks in a ZFS storage pool. I've added 2 small SSD drives for read and write caching (L2ARC and mirrored ZIL, respectively) just in case the 6 disks wasn't fast enough in the first place, or simply because I could.
On this I have a "SmartMachine Base" zone for CIFS filesharing on the home network, and a few KVM virtual machines running Debian with different roles:
…and soon also:
I wonder what breaks first. It can't be this good forever…