[jeffbee]

It depends on what "this" you meant, but in general the ways of netbooting an OS are many and varied. You'd have to declare what kind of root device you ultimately want, such as root on iSCSI.

Personally, I feel that "smartOS does not support booting from a local block device like a normal, sane operating system" might be a drawback and is a peculiar thing to brag about.

[cyberpunk]

There was a brilliant incident back in the joyent days where they accidentally rebooted an entire datacenter and ended up dossing their dhcp server ;)

[ptribble]

SmartOS can, of course, boot from a local zfs pool, but it treats it logically as just another source for the bootable image. See the piadm(8) command.

[nZac]

What I'm looking to achieve are three identical proxmox host boxes. As soon as you finish the install you now have three snowflakes no matter how hard you try.

In the case of smartOS (which I've never used) it would seem like that is achieved in the design because the USB isn't changing. Reboot and you are back to a clean slate.

Isn't this how game arcades boot machines? They all netboot from a single image for the game you have selected? That is what it seems smartOS is doing but maybe I'm missing the point.

[ekropotin]

It doesn't look like it's achievable with vanilla Proxmox.

I think if you really-really want declaratively for host machines, you'd need to ditch Proxmox in favor of Incur on top of NixOS.

There is also https://github.com/SaumonNet/proxmox-nixos, but it's pretty new and therefore full of rough edges.