Solaris 11 Released

angry tapir writes "Oracle has updated its Unix-based operating system Solaris, adding some features that would make the OS more suitable for running cloud deployments, as well as integrating it more tightly with other Oracle products. While not as widely known for its cloud software, Oracle has been marketing Solaris as a cloud-friendly OS. In Oracle's architecture, users can set up different partitions, called Zones, inside a Solaris implementation, which would allow different workloads to run simultaneously, each within their own environment, on a single machine."

Comments

Re:I guess Ellison changed his mind

[evilviper]

I guess Ellison changed his mind about cloud computing...

Quite the opposite. In your own link he summarized by saying:

"I'm not going to fight this thing." but "I don't understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing, other than change the wording on some of our ads."

And sure enough, their ads now show how great Solaris is for cloud computing. Based on what?... zones, which have been in Solaris for a number of years.

Re:ZFS v31+ at last?

[nrozema]

While ZFS at v28 has proven to be both a lot of fun and very useful for many of us, the updates since (first available for general use with Solaris 11 Express last year I believe) add a few really nice features

Careful, they've also abruptly removed a few really nice features in later versions that have caused major headaches for me and many others. For example the "aclmode" property was completely removed from version 31 - completely breaking a lot of deployments that made extensive use of ACLs. Version 33 released today with Solaris 11 thankfully restores that feature after significant outcry from affected customers (I believe Illumos went forward and restored it on their own as well) - but the damage has been done in a lot of cases.

Just a word of warning to be very careful before running "zpool upgrade" as Oracle's philosophy on backward compatibility and stability of existing features seems to be quite different than that of Sun.

Re:Zones

[MichaelJ]

Given that Zones can have:
different login identities
different network interfaces
different hostnames
different hardware available to them (disks, adapters, etc.)
be configured to use resource pools thus different amounts of cpu, floating or fixed

Yes, I'd say they are much more useful than chroot.

Re:Cloud hosting

[TheRaven64]

There is no modern OS that can mitigate an application that is bad

Of course there is! That's the entire point of the OS. If an application can bring down the OS, then that's an OS bug. The responsibility of a time sharing system is to ensure that no process and no user monopolises the resources to the extent that others are unable to do anything. The correct behaviour in this case (and the behaviour I've seen on Solaris, recent OS X, and FreeBSD), is for the Apache process to slow right down and other users to experience a noticeable amount of degraded performance (unless they're running with elevated privileges). Being unable to log in from the console because of the actions of an unrelated userspace process is simply unacceptable.