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Oracle Solaris 11 Express Released
comay writes "Today Oracle released Solaris 11 Express 2010.11. It includes a large number of new features (PDF) not found in either Oracle Solaris 10 or previous OpenSolaris releases, including ZFS encryption and deduplication, network-based packaging and provisioning systems, network virtualization, optimized I/O for NUMA platforms and optimized platform support including support for Intel's latest Nehalem and SPARC T3. In addition, Oracle Solaris 10 support is available from within a container/zone so migration of existing systems is greatly simplified."
Reader gtirloni adds, "Oracle also announced that this is not a beta or preview, but a full, supported release aimed at everybody developing, testing, prototyping or demonstrating applications running on the latest Solaris release (not allowed to be used in production)."
Wasn't Oracle going to kill all good stuff from Sun according to the slashdot hivemind?
does it run linux?
Dennis Onstenk
Thanks, Larry. Unfortunately, we're up to our ears in new hardware running virtual instances of Solaris 8 and 9 still. Imagine all that wonderful new crap we could do with Solaris 11? Like hosting Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 forever... Please do something useful like not being a giant IT asshole. Thanks!
Oh, and great work on Java and OpenOffice! Way to drive off any good developers. Guess you'll need to raise your prices even more to pay for angry junior software engineers to replace freely available, superior talent. Weren't you going to ride a balloon to the sun, or was that Beardy Branson? I get you two confused.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
So, it's a "Full, Supported Release", but we can't use it for anything except as a development platform (and what to deploy on?). From the license agreement: We can't "use the Programs for your own internal business purposes... or for any commercial or production purposes" So in reality, it's just a way to show off, an try to keep people from jumping ship to linux. It's definitely the antithesis of FOSS -- nothing is free about it.
I am sitting here trying to take a short break from fighting with MySQL on Solaris, and I find that Oracle has released Solaris 11, with Encrypted ZFS, something that I have needed for over a year. I think I will get out my bow, and hunt down Larry, he must pay. Or maybe I will just install Linux on this box and be happy.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Solaris was basically the only good software to come out of Sun.
Even though it's merely 15 years old, Java has aged quite badly. As a language, it's now far behind C#, and even further behind cutting-edge languages like Scala. Its standard library is full of obsolete crud that needs to be removed. Netbeans is, to put it nicely, a pile of crap.
I don't even need to point out how shitty MySQL is. If its problems aren't obvious to you, you need to stop working with databases before you make an even bigger mess than you already have.
It's no wonder that OpenOffice.org never really took off. It's slow, it's bloated, and still has compatibility issues, even after decades of development.
This is only allowed to be used in dev. They killed Open Solaris. It certainly seems like they are killing a good part of the *free* stuff from Sun to me.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Yes, you can't use the free download version for any production use. It's really annoying, and severely limits the usefulness of S11 Express.
However, note that if you have an Oracle Premium Support contract (all Oracle Support is Premium ;-), then you have an entitlement to use S11 Express in a production environment, and receive normal support for it, just like you have an RTU and Support for Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris 10 via the same contract.
This is just an FYI - I'm not commenting on the utility or "goodness" of S11Express.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
It seems you actually CAN request a support contract for Solaris 11 Express. The issue seems to be that the download from the Oracle Technology Network alone doesn't give you that hability (to use in production). It looks like they should have paid more attention to the wording... the download from OTN shouldn't be used in production but if you want support to use it in production, contact Oracle. This has been pointed out to many people, perhaps they will make that more explicity. The download page also mentions it's a "full supported release".
none
I'm glad to see some positive news coming from Oracle. Solaris is a great OS and I'm thankful that I can keep using it for free on my servers at home.
Now if we could also get full ZFS support for Linux, that would be great.
Solaris 11 Express is aimed at people that want to preview the features that will come in full production mode in Solaris 11. But they are also offering support for the Express edition today (the license terms are kind of cryptic, as always). I can't see how Oracle is killing Solaris no matter how hard I try to imagine that.
none
Wake me when these features are available in OpenIndiana and Nexenta Core. I'll not be trapped investing more time in platforms where ``I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.''
First there's Red Hat's "Linux by the pound" announcement and then this humdinger. I'm ready to learn .NET.
Sadly, I'm only half joking....
How come when an Oracle story gets posted these days, I think of Karl Popper's work . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Should of been posted in the "who-gives-a-shit" department. Do we really care what Oracle offers anymore?
Solaris... there are alternatives. I wonder if ZFS will continue to be released to be used in FreeBSD.
OpenOffice.org... some project will build on it (and I do not need "Office"-Software, LaTeX does what I need).
Java... "Open" is not really done and the other license...
The only thing that I really worry about is VirtualBox. I have not found any other free Desktop virtualization that works.
You may not:
- use the Programs for your own internal business purposes (other than developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating your applications) or for any commercial or production purposes;
- remove or modify any program markings or any notice of our proprietary rights;
- make the Programs available in any manner to any third party;
- use the Programs to provide third-party training;
- assign this agreement or give or transfer the Programs or an interest in them to another individual or entity;
- cause or permit reverse engineering (unless required by law for interoperability), disassembly or decompilation of the Programs;
- disclose results of any benchmark test results related to the Programs without our prior consen
So if you work for an organisation that has been drinking the VMWare Koolaid and wants to virtualize everything from their servers to their dekstops to their network firewalls/appliances how does Solaris x86 play under ESX?
The old advantage of the IBMs and the Oracles of "it is our software, our OS running on our hardware supported by our services business" is being eroded a bit by the desire to drop anything and everything into the same ESX farm...
Solaris had it's shot at being something the Slashdot crowd could pick up and run with, but given that you can't use Solaris for anything useful now I'm not sure how this qualifies as news. Solaris is now a very high-end OS that's as relevant to people as AIX is, because that's the only feasible place it can survive now.
They're just giving away the development tools for free. So when/if developers use them, and end users like the result, they've got you by the short and curlies. It's a time honoured tradition, often rightly or wrongly compared to a drug dealer's "the first hit is free, kid".
Another way of looking at it:
Prospective customer is already a Solaris (or Oracle DB, etc.) shop, and wants a project based on this platform. If the development tools cost a fortune, you might pass up the business.
That still doesn't excuse Oracle for its shabby treatment of the OpenSolaris community - though Sun was partly to blame with its half-hearted opening of Solaris to begin with. Illumos will be nice to have, but it's going to be a while before they replace the closed code with open code.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
The gotcha here, if it's like the way Oracle's jigged things for Solaris 10 and earlier, is that they'll only support it (and license it for production) if you buy a full-bore support contract on the hardware--and they'll only write support contracts on Sun/Oracle branded iron purchased from them or an authorized reseller. You want licenses for those 25 servers you just picked up from a refurb house? Sorry...
I lost touch with Sun microprocessor development since I left my life as an IT/Unix specialist behind me, a couple of years ago. I am pleasantly surprised to learn that Sun engineers have been working at it, though, and have produced a rather intriguing architecture with 16 cores and 8 HW threads per core. That's pretty fucking impressive, methinks, especially since it seems to integrate two 1/10 GB ethernet controllers on die, and the 4 DDR3 channels are not bad to have, either. Anyhow, I think this is the most exciting CPU, for me, of recent years.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
There's a wonderfully simple solution to this. Time to move off them expensive SPARC boxes...
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Not anymore, they finally created this:
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/solaris/non-sun-x86-081976.html
Oracle has over 300,000 customers of it's products. Sun had 30,000. I think the future looks bright for commercial Solaris. At the end of the day someone has to pay for the R&D that leads to innovation and Oracle knows how to sell software and make money. It's called capitalism and it's what pays everyone's salaries. And it's because of this that we will see more innovations like ZFS and DTrace.
This is a good thing as competition always benefits everyone including open source.
I'm disappointed that there's been almost no activity out of OpenIndiana's web site (http://openindiana.org/latest-news/). It was supposed to be the next-best thing to an official open-source fork, but for whatever reason it's been dead since its release...
Just beware -- Don't make the mistake of putting this in production. The "Express" version of Oracle is not taken seriously by Oracle support - There are no Oracle support bulletins for Express versions of the RDBMS - it's just off their radar. If you have an issue, and you will, you are on your own...
This post is extremely dishonest. If you've actually installed enough to get that output, that necessarily means you already realize (1) you installed from some experimental .tar.gz file with all kinds of undocumented tampering, meant for development, not from the actual release .iso the way the 2.4 'lx' brand installs, so 'cat /etc/redhat-release' doesn't actually mean the installer ran up to that point which is something it would imply to any reasonable individual. In fact the GNU tar that extracted that .tar.gz was probably the solaris one, not even Linux tar.
And (2) it's so broken that basic programs like 'rm' don't run! That page says, b131 was the first one with enough basic syscalls for 'rm' to work. and lx brand was moved to the attic in b143 (search for EOF lx brand).
This field is full of overwhelming arcania, and without the good faith effort of people like yourself we'll make bad decisions and garble our own history. Please don't spew out deliberately misleading teasers just for the contrary LULZ of it.
Yep, quotes from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/08/sun_bonuses_ibm/ :
"However, IBM operates in the real world of profit and loss, and sources told The Reg categorically that IBM failed to get a satisfactory answer on which, if any, of Sun's software makes money."
"Only if Sun accepts the full facts, and quits playing the kind of Silicon Valley game that has given Web 2.0 services like Digg ridiculous assumed valuations based on nothing more than number or users and potential future revenues can Sun's own future resume in earnest, with IBM."
or else it gets the hose again!
Solaris is dead. If you are still running on some ancient Sun hardware & paying through the nose for support, more power to you. You're stupid. We have virtualized our environment
using Citrix XenServer and I have a VM that is more powerful than our old Sun E10k. Runs circles around it, not even a contest. We killed off Oracle 10g too with Postgres Enterprisedb.
See ya Oracle.
During installation on a V100 it requested the date and would only accept year values 1900-1999.
Oddly, after reboot it's now displaying the proper date.
How long until the ZFS features are ported to BSD? THAT is something I'd be seriously interested in, since I run a production environment on a tight budget and thus cannot use this version of Solaris.
So Oracle lets you taste their OS for free but do not allow you to directly make money out of it. They do however allow you to develop stuff for a customer running Solaris and to make money that way. I don't see any problem whatsoever with this. Sure they may have killed OpenSolaris which they probably owned largely.
Whaddya want for nothin? Rubber biscuit?
I myself quit OpenSolaris long ago as the buggy menu-driven admin-tools drove me mad and config file specification were either virtually illegible or incomplete.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I can't speak for the other products but yes, this new release is fully supported by Oracle. You can find details on the support offerings that cover both Sun/Oracle hardware and third-party hardware here. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/overview/index.html
Yes, yes they did.
And if you follow your link, then the link to "1-4" sockets, you'll be taken to the page where you can purchase "Oracle Solaris Premier Subscription for Non-Oracle Hardware (1-4 socket server)"
It's ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS......PER YEAR.
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
Even if it is "free" for personal use, beware. Unless you have an Oracle support contract, you are out of luck if you encounter problems. I'm not sure if outsiders can even file a bug report now, much less get an actual fix in a timely manner.
Gone are the days of helpful people on Sun's mailing lists who could supply a quick source fix when things go awry. This was a common occurrence on zfs-discuss, and now you will have no recourse whatsoever.
Solaris Express is a development release, and without the source, you are at the mercy of Oracle, regardless of how much you pay. That is not a good place to be...
The story says that it is "not allowed to be used in production". That is not correct. Instead, it works like this (from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/overview/faqs-oraclesolaris11express-185609.pdf):
* If you want to use it in production, you need to purchase support (for example "Oracle Solaris Premier Subscription for non-Oracle hardware")
* If you don't buy the support contract, you can use it for evaluation and development
Pay for production use, free for other use.
For those who are looking for a free and community driven alternative distribution of Solaris Express (which will soon be based on Illumos) without such restrictions check out the OpenIndiana distribution:
http://openindiana.org/
http://openindiana.org/download/
http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/OpenIndiana+Wiki+Home
Q.14 says you can use it for evaluation and testing. There is no time limit. It's a we get no money, you get no support and no money thing. If you recommend a product for production, even if you don't take money for it, you can be sued for bugs in some countries. So Oracle does not recommend the product for any activities, where a bug can result in damages, if you don't pay anything.
There is another gotch too. Previous releases of Solaris have been backwards compatible, but in order to change to Solaris 11 Express from OpenSolaris, you must remove PostgreSQL first!! http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/en_US/entry/upgrading_from_opensolaris_2009_06 I bet that pus a smile on the face of the PostgreSQL developers!
One thing which I haven't seen mentioned is hobbyist usage, especially on surplus UltraSPARC hardware. I recently acquired a used Ultra 5 on which is now installed Solaris 11 Express. So far, my only issues have been getting a working X configuration and getting a Prism2-based WiFi card to work (PCI, supposedly supported by the pcwl(5) driver).
I'm an old Unix/Linux geek, but my last Solaris exposure was Sol9 on a Sparc 20. It has, so far, been interesting to learn about some of the newer innovations such as ZFS and the new service handling and administration.