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: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.