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Depends on what you're doing. SmartOS is almost entirely focused on "cloud". Think of it like an alternative to CoreOS.

For more general purpose servers, I think the current leader is OmniOS.

Can SmartOS run on AWS?

No, SmartOS can run your own quasi-AWS on metal.

Can SmartOS itself run as a SmartOS VM with an independent kernel, alongside Linux or FreeBSD VMs, all on top of SmartOS? It's a bit confusing to call something with a VMM an "OS".

SmartOS offers two ways to host VMs: Zones & KVM. Zones is os-virtualization, so you run SmartOS zones on SmartOS but it uses the same kernel. KVM is hardware virtualization and allows you to run other operating systems on top. So you can have Linux, FreeBSD, Windows or even nested SmartOS with a different kernel running inside.

So zones make running nested SmartOS with KVM a bit uncommen. While possible there are not that many use cases besides development on the system itself.

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