The Return Of Solaris 9 For x86

The Pi-Guy writes: "Hoping that I won't screw up again about Solaris 9 on x86 again, this time I'm sure I got it right... eWeek is covering that indeed, Sun will be shipping Solaris 9 for x86 after all!!! Also in that article, they note that Sun is shipping a x86 based server, which will ship the 26th. It will be running a Sun Linux distro... Many surprises from Sun today!!"

Comments

This is what Solaris x86 should be used for...

[cnelzie]

As a stepping stone for those geeks that want to learn and work on Solaris, but are unable to afford real Sun hardware and don't want to take the risks associated with second-hand-could-be-missing-important-pieces-of-h ardware Sparcstations from Ebay.

For instance, I personally used Solaris 8 x86 for this purpose. I loaded it up on an old 200Mhz system that I had laying around. Granted the installation took way to long, the boot process took way to long. However, in the end, I had a functioning Solaris running box to play with.

I started learning the Solaris commands. The files in /etc. How to configure it for a network. How to setup services. A variety of things that I simply would have been unable to do, if Solaris x86 didn't exist.

Why knock Solaris x86 as slow? As a Solaris learning platform, it is more than perfect for someone on a budget who may have a spare PC, but little dough to blow on Ebay. Personally, I wouldn't use it in a production environment, on the hardware that it came with.

I am quite certain that it will be faster with specially provided drivers for hardware that has the "blessing" of Sun.

If you ignore a tool for the other uses it has, does that make the tool less usefull or you less usefull?

-.-

I'm happy, but why are they doing this?

[fmaxwell]

As a Solaris x86 user, I'm happy that Sun is releasing Solaris 9 for x86, but I continue to be puzzled as to why they are doing so. It makes no business sense to me. A modern x86 running Solaris 9 will spank a Sun Blade 100, so providing an x86 version of Solaris seems likely to hurt sales of lower-end Sun workstations. A decent x86 box is blindingly fast, in fact, and I would not be surprised to see them even hurt sales of low-end UltraSPARC servers. From a business standpoint, I think that Sun should have stuck to their guns and told the world "if you want to run Solaris, you will have to buy a Sun computer."

For the Linux crowd, the Solaris OS has a level of stability, maturity, and unified feel that Linux simply lacks. It's a one-company vision of how a Unix OS should work and, while I don't always agree with them, the consistency is refreshing. No, this isn't flamebait or a troll. I have removable drives with Mandrake 8.2 and Solaris 8 and I'm not bashing Linux, but I'd sooner choose Solaris for a mission-critical application.

Re:Sun LX50 Servers

[pmz]

What are the real differences between Linux and Solaris as server OSes?

Solaris has:

- extreme CPU, disk, and peripheral scalability
- mature 64-bit support
- multiple scheduling and VM algorithms
- fine-grained patch management
- Dynamic Reconfiguration (allows partially-broken servers to continue running)
- easy hot-swapping
- Dynamic System Domains (multiple OS images)
- multipathing for networks and disks
- bundled management software (SMC, Disksuite, etc.)
- fairly easy installation (similar to Red Hat's install but much more robust)
- JumpStart automatic installation
- sccs (minor detail, but I like it)
- really good bundled documentation (enough to get a sysadmin cert. using it)

And I'm sure there are many more. One thing that is frustrating sometimes is that the Solaris vs. Linux vs. Windows arguments lose many of these details. Most people mindlessly regurgitate benchmarks or marketing-speak trying to justify their basically-religious feelings when an objective analysis would pose a much different argument.