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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."
Ever since the demise of SGI I haven't looked at anything but Linux / BSD, but this makes me wonder if there is maybe life for Solaris after all.
Would be nice if this was more geared towards the server end of things, which is where I would expect you'd deploy solaris much sooner than on the desktop.
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I love that Sun open sourced it, however I think that the greatest benifit is not that it's open but that the technologies it offers are available to be reproduced on other nix os's. The biggest issue I have with OpenSolaris is that it's still a single vendor OS. If it forks a few times and actually develops a culture and some competition between vendors than I think it will be more appealing.
That's actually what I hate and love about linux. It's a fragmented and ineffecient community, but because it's fragmented I don't have to worry that it's going away any time soon.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Horses for courses, but Solaris has much to offer even for shops that aren't traditionally tied to Sun. Hell, even my private ``1U box in someone else's datacentre'' server for my family is now a Solaris machine.
ian
Someone asked me this question recently. And for the sixth time I answered with a laundry list of things I didn't like about it. Agian, I was modded Troll for stating I don't like Ubuntu/Kubuntu, and then people got all in a huff.
Like I always say, it is marketed at a certain target audience, and it isn't me.
I suggest that you try out a really good KDE desktop (Arch's KDEMod, Sabayon, openSUSE 11, etc) and the differences should be immediately apparent to you.
As far as whether or not the KDE packages are available in Nexenta, I'm not sure actually.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Solaris scales far better than any BSD or Linux distro out there.
Yeah, you know, the roadrunner team would like a word with you, as would pretty much everyone in the Top 500. For some business loads Solaris scales better. But the claim the "it scales far better" in general is as absurd as it is patently untrue.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
Ah, and no true scotsman^W UNIX admin would run a supercomputer, right?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Having been a UNIX admin for 23 years and Solaris for 10 years, I'm not sure what you're drinking, but I'm staying away from it.
Solaris support has rocked. We've never had an issue that Sun hasn't been able to solve, and yes, we've thrown them some curves (and sliders for that matter). IBM's support has told us on multiple occasions to re-install the system as a fix for a problem. RedHat we've stumped more often than not. HP? Well - they still can't figure out how to handle more than 8 luns per target for scsi (as well as fibre)...
Solaris performance has been fantastic - outperforming Linux, AIX, HP-UX on modern equipment.
We've migrated workloads to and from Solaris - no big deal - as long as you know what you're doing.
(Our misguided DBA's started migrating from old SunOS 5.8 boxes to Linux - and are now migrating back.)
If you use tools that are available on multiple platforms, migrating isn't all that tough.
If you are developing native language apps, porting isn't terribly difficult although finding workarounds for pesky native quirks is troublesome at times.
So I guess it depends on what you call "experienced"...
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Actually, Solaris doesn't use the BSD TCP stack. They completey replaced the stack in Solaris 10.
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.
Ok, I'll call you on this one. I'm a SCSA (Solaris Certified System Administrator) and a former Sun SSE. I've worked with Solaris systems going back to 1996 on original Sparcstations (not even Ultrasparcs). I've also worked on Enterprise 10000, 15000, and 25000. We also have a smattering of Sun Fire X4600s, the new AMD Opteron boxes.
I tested Solaris 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (64-bit) on the exact same hardware (X4600), and you know what? Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 performed better on massive storage I/O than Solaris 10. I have the Oracle ORION benchmarks to prove it. We have over 50 LUNs carved from an HP EVA 8100 and presented to these X4600s, on 4x 4gb HBAs per server. They run Oracle RAC, have 4x quad core AMD Opterons, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Sorry, but Solaris used to be a good OS back in the 90s. They have fallen so far behind it's not even funny. The reality now is that I can run Red Hat and Oracle on a 32 core AMD Opteron box with a hundred LUNs on a fibre channel SAN and it outperforms Solaris now. ZFS is nice, but we use ASM (automated storage management) for Oracle anyway, so ZFS is unnecessary.
Solaris has unfortunately fallen far behind the performance curve, and I doubt they can ever catch up. Your BS about HP not supporting more than 8 LUNs per target is absolutely BS. I can do hundreds of LUNs, and I have systems like that in production.
On support, they all suck. Red Hat, HP, Sun, every one of them sucks. They have all been chasing the bottom and if it ever gets to the point where I'm stumped, they're going to be stumped as well.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
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.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
No offense taken, but your first line is a typical response from most linux users -- anything that goes wrong is either an admin issue or a hardware issue.
First, md forgetting drives is not a hardware issue. Linux sees the drive, the serial number of the drive is the same, the hardware does not change, the hardware works. Sometimes, you will boot, and it just loses the configuration, so you reconfigure the array, and wait for it to check everything out. For two hours. At 3am.
Wiping out configuration during upgrades happened for two consecutive releases of the master distribution. Everything is backed up, but 3/4's of the machines didn't boot properly after md was upgraded. Turned out this was a pretty known issue. No one ever thought that people would want things migrated. Everyone seems to have a few hours to manually move arrays over.
Look, I'm all for great, open, free technology. The problem is, most people don't think about the big picture. LVM and MD are fine for personal machines that don't do much more than serve up files, or play music, or what have you. Technology like ZFS is designed to be bulletproof, documented, and it has to be supported. Not only that, but given the right amount of RAM, ZFS can outperform many off the shelf RAID systems, and give you flexibility in mirroring, snapshots, and drive support that LVM cannot possibly compare to.
The only reason ZFS hasn't had much news in Linux land is that it 'wasn't invented here' and it isn't GPL. Last I heard, there was a movement underway to reimplement ZFS under the GPL. I would imagine we'll see something in five years or so.
- oZ
// i am here.