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Solaris 9 x86 Review

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the kicking-the-tires dept.

ValourX writes "Here is a review of Solaris 9 x86, 08/03 edition. Now that the single-CPU edition is free to download for non-commercial use, people will be compelled to write a Solaris CD and try it out. Read this first -- there are a lot of things you should know before you begin. You might want to check out the documentation or explore other resources like the hardware compatibility list as well."

4 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. How does this help us, or Sun by djh101010 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Don't get me wrong. I'm a Sun guy going back to the SunOS 3.5 days, Solaris is a wonderful thing. But, for x86, we have lots of *BSD and Linux options. Solaris on x86 has previously been limited in hardware supported, and in community participation.

    Can someone suggest a case where it would make more sense to use x86 Solaris rather than Sparc solaris?

    It seems to me that Sun's resources in these (ahem) difficult times for them would be better spent in developing what they're best at - big, robust, server-room boxes, rather than diluting their OS development efforts by spending time porting it to Intel.

    1. Re:How does this help us, or Sun by adam872 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I often ask myself (or am asked by someone else) the question "why do you use SPARC/Solaris when there are supposedly cheaper alternatives?"

      - Reliability: I have found Solaris to be the most stable and reliable server OS I've used (obviously IBM Mainframes and VMS are even more so, but I haven't really got a lot of experience with them). This counts for a lot, as most of the sites I've looked after demand this in their requirements. Linux is pretty good too, but I have found Solaris to be absolutely rock solid.

      - Relatively secure. It doesn't come out of the box with all the security you'd want, but its pretty damn easy to automate the install to get it to be so. It's certainly more secure than Windows :)

      - Support. I've always found Sun support to be excellent, either through SunSolve or the call centres. This is a big plus.

      - Application and Hardware support. Most of the big software and hardware vendors have a Solaris version. Makes it a bit easier to deploy things when you know they are certified.

      - Ease of admin. I have become so used to Solaris that sys admin is pretty much second nature (but you could easily say the same for other OS's I guess).

      - Standards compliant. All of the usual suspects are here: NFS, NIS, LDAP etc etc. Some of these standards were even developed by or with Sun's help. Interoperability is easier with Solaris than manyh other OS's IMHO.

      I could go on and on, but that's my 2c. Obviously other folks will be able to say the same things for other OS's, but Sun have earned my trust (and dollars) over the years. I don't see any reason to fix what is already working, particularly with the price of their hardware coming down dramatically.

  2. Not a fair review by UNIXGK · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The entire review really boils down to one statement: "It's not Linux". And it's not. Solaris is an enterprise OS--standards compliant, stable, scalable, extremely well documented, and well supported (both through free and paid channels). It has good performance management tools, too. It beats Linux handily in all of these categories.

    These are things you won't notice immediately "out of the box", but you'll certainly notice them if you need maximum uptime for your mission-critical enterprise applications. If the factors I mentioned above mean something to you, then you probably already have Solaris in your environment.

  3. Solaris Vs. LINUX FUD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I seldom read all the way through Slashdot comments because of signal/noise ratio but Solaris is near and dear to my heart. I've used Solaris/SPARC in server environments in several projects at several companies and I would like to weigh in with a vote of confidence for two very important factors: reliability, and scalability. In our telecommunications startup we had a multi-tiered web server / application server / database architecture. We designed it to scale big and we needed incredibly high uptimes. We put a lot of effort into architecting the solution and we relied very heavily on Solaris for reliable and scalable 'servability'.

    It delivered 100%. We had major problems in other areas of our company, project, and personal lives but Solaris was the bedrock of our company and it was stable. We never had to worry about bugs or issues or whatevers.

    We leveraged a lot of free software to sweeten things, we intermixed development on Windows to cut our development costs.

    As someone who has worked closely with Solaris I was pretty disappointed with one apparently biased Linux user's inability to make light work of a Solaris install. Solaris is not a hobby system and you aren't going to play too many games on it. No you aren't going to have fun recompiling the Solaris kernel, but then maybe there are other productive tasks at hand...

    - AndrewZ