OpenSolaris From a Linux Admin and User Perspective

MSa writes "How does OpenSolaris, Sun's effort to free its big-iron OS, fare from a Linux user's point of view? Is it merely a passable curiosity right now, or is it truly worth installing? Linux Format takes OpenSolaris for a test drive, examining the similarities and differences between the OS and a typical Linux distro. If you want to sample the mighty ZFS filesystem, OpenSolaris is definitely the way to go."

Comments

Nexenta

[Enderandrew]

I'd try Nexenta, except I don't really want to use the Ubuntu repositories for my Linux packages. I'd prefer something with a good KDE desktop.

I'd consider it for a web-server box to test how the kernel handles I/O.

Re:Nexenta

[bigstrat2003]

This is a matter of taste. "I don't like it" is sufficient reasoning for this arena, like it or not. Furthermore, you have no reasonable basis to say he's saying this "just to get a reaction". He doesn't give what you consider to be good reasons for his opinion, so he's stating his opinion just to get a reaction. Erm, no, it doesn't work that way.

People, not just on slashdot, but on internet forums in general, love to claim that those whose arguments they disagree with must be trolling. It's fucking pathetic, and is just a sign that these people can't handle an opposing point of view with any amount of dignity. Grow up already.

Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective

[Marillion]

It all depends on the skill-set your admins already have. If you have a shop of 100% Linux admins with no Solaris experience, stay away. If your shop already has some Solaris machines on Sparc, go for it - although you should double check the license.

From my own perspective, I've invested several hours getting it running. Granted, I was running the 200805 OpenSolaris installed on ZFS which had some bugs in the boot process which left my system unbootable a few times. Some follow up releases fixed those problems. But as a guy who's been using Linux since 1993, old habits are hard to break.

Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective

[TheRaven64]

It doesn't matter how many drivers any given kernel supports. All that matters is if it has drivers for the hardware you want to run it on. If you're buying a server then you will typically buy one which comes with support for the OS you want to run and so you won't encounter driver difficulties (although you might pay a bit more).

Re:Love that they open sourced it... but...

[TheRaven64]

He said 'other nix os's' not 'Linux'. The GPL may be incompatible with the CDDL, but the BSDL isn't, and bits of Solaris, such as ZFS and DTrace, have found their way into FreeBSD.

Saying the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL is misleading - the CDDL doesn't say anything about code not explicitly released under it. It is the GPL which imposes constraints on third-party code. If Linux used a more permissive license then it would be able to use OpenSolaris code, and OpenSolaris would be able to use Linux code just as it used to use a lot of BSD code back in the SunOS days.

Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective

[BrainInAJar]

Couple points:

"ZFS - Are you really using your server for data storage? SAN or NAS should be a better option depending on your price point"
Why not set up a server for data storage? Then you get all the ZFS checksum/auto-heal/snapshot goodness ?

"Zones - I still have yet to see a reason to use this except for dedicated virtualization servers."
Zones are so cheap, I run every single service in a zone so that they can be migrated between machines, any dependencies can be contained, etc. If you haven't seen a use for them it's because you haven't ever used them.

"rcapd - ulimit can do this per process, and there are also multiple 3rd party open source resource limiters."
And yanking the ram stick can do it per-machine. How coarse grained do you want to go before you look like a fool?

In almost every case, the Solaris and other random unix environments could be replaced with Linux at 1/10th the cost."
Solaris is free. Support is 1/3 the price of RHEL. It runs on cheap Dell/Supermicro whiteboxes.

Re:maybe I should go and play around with this!

[outZider]

You've run ZFS in production, yet you can't see the improvement on Linux's model? You mean the fact that md is completely broken and LVM is unreliable and slow by comparison?