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

What Sun built in goodwill, Oracle destroys.

[sethstorm]

Given how much they've done negatively to OpenSolaris (taking it from developer-friendly to "we don't care how many people get compromised, we're not going to hand out security updates without a large-fee contract", Oracle's made it worse than AIX.

Re:What Sun built in goodwill, Oracle destroys.

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenSolaris was a cool project, don't get me wrong, but from a business perspective it had pretty much zero benefit and arguably a negative one. There was little to no community contribution back to the Solaris code base. All of the stuff that made Solaris great was developed in-house and the only thing that opening the source code did for Sun/Oracle is that it enabled a number of other projects and startups to profit off of Sun's investment in developing Solaris. A number of storage vendors have forked or built on top of OpenSolaris to take advantage of ZFS and made some tidy profits doing so with no royalties to Sun/Oracle.

Now don't get me wrong - I like open source, but I just wouldn't consider myself a fanatic like RMS and think in this particular instance, Oracle made a smart business move - why should Oracle give everything away for free if there is essentially no community contribution to the product and only enables people to freeload off of their expensive R&D department?

still no ZFS bp rewrite

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years and counting and still no ZFS bp rewrite implemented. For those that care, this presumably is required to implement such uninteresting things as vdev removal and defragmentation. And please, no defrag-denialists here... ZFS fragments like a cheap suit dipped into liquid nitrogen.

Re:Solaris is good as dead

[afabbro]

How exactly has Oracle "messed up" VirtualBox?

Re:Zones

[spacey]

They're OK... until you try to manage different (commercial) applications on them. When app 1 requires a kernel patch, well there's no real virtualization there - the zones still run the same kernel, so when app 2 requires a different, incompatible patch, you get the throw up your hands and become the IT that says "no".

These are old issues, but trying to sell zones as the end-all be-all, or as even much more interesting than a BSD jail, is bogus.

Let's get to real issues that this doesn't change: patch management is a nightmare on solaris. 11 hasn't changed this. The OS is waaaay overpriced vs. the competition, and very unsophisticated processes monitoring via smf (I honestly think they should have cut their losses and just used runit - most of the benefits, none of the academically-inspired and simply stupid limitations in compiling the graph at boot time vs run time vs build time.... ugh).

Re:Cloud hosting

[SomePgmr]

Nonsense. I've been watching people on slashdot trash things they know absolutely nothing about for something near a decade.

I come here for the ones that can call them out on it. :)

Re:Cloud hosting

[TheRaven64]

Really than why don't they hate linux? After all as a linux admin my life was made hard by linux much more often than windows or Solaris

Some of us do. And if you think Linux makes your life difficult as an admin, spare a thought for developers. Poor standards compliance, convoluted APIs (e.g. no unified kernel event mechanism, unlike *BSD and Solaris), a massive overdose of NIH (e.g. OSS, which works everywhere and is a simple userland API, vs ALSA which only works on Linux and is a mess), and a deprecation-happy team that seems to delight in deprecating APIs as soon as you've started using them.

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[account_deleted]

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Solaris Zones have been around for years....

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris Zones have been around for years... more stupid "it's new & cloud-based" crap when is just re-marketing their old technology.