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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."
I know it is the usual thing to hate on slashdot, but Solaris combined with cloud hosting works wonders for our company. It's generally much more easier to deploy than Linux based distros, and comes with extra performance. Our sites usually have a stable amount of traffic, but sometimes it peaks, and those are the times we really want the website to perform well. Solaris+Cloud hosting is perfect for that. As fallback, we have Azure, which also performs really good, but it requires extra work as it's different platform. But generally, scalable cloud hosting really is good for hosting big traffic sites.
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.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
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.
I only use real Unix, like Solaris and Mac OS X, rather than cheap, reverse-engineered, and possibly illegal copies like Linux. At my age and high salary, I should be living like an adult and not steal digital content (like Unix software, movies, or music). I guess if you're young, stupid, and/or poor, then you can go ahead and do immoral things (like touching yourself at night as you stroke your neckbeard, which is what 90% of you do).
You can have longer than 8 character user names, but the characters after 8 are ignored. It's defined in limits.h as LOGNAME_MAX. It's an ABI restriction, hard-coded in several binary formats, NIS restriction, and UNIX interoperability issue. Another limit is the 32-bit character limit from POSIX, but that's been removed, I understand. Don't blame me--I'm just telling you.
Oracle has messed up Solaris and pretty much everything they have acquired (Java, Vbox, OO).
Jeez, only a complete loser would have an 8-character user name.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Let me quote from an email that an associate of mine recently sent me on his experience with Oracle.
"Oracle Solaris Cloud leverages core skillsets and world-class synergy through teamwork to provide clients worldwide with robust, scalable, modern turnkey implementations of flexible, personalized, cutting-edge Internet-enabled ebusiness application product suite esolution architectures that accelerate response to customer and real-world market demands and reliably adapt to evolving technology needs, seamlessly and efficiently integrating and synchronizing with their existing legacy infrastructure, enhancing the sodomy-readiness capabilities of their ecommerce production environments across the enterprise while giving them a critical competitive advantage and taking them to the next level."
The problem is that for certain purposes, Linux just isn't a viable alternative because it does not contain production-quality support for ZFS. If you're building a NAS device, this is (or should be) a deal-breaker. All the existing Linux file systems suck, and even btrfs doesn't seem to take data integrity nearly as seriously as ZFS does.
I guess Ellison changed his mind about cloud computing... here's him a year or two back ranting about how stupid the idea is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0
Linux won't even boot on sun4u machines :(
Hasn't been updated in awhile, but https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/SPARC I've also had gentoo and ubuntu running on ultra 5 workstations...
I am d3matt
You can have longer than 8 character user names, but the characters after 8 are ignored. It's defined in limits.h as LOGNAME_MAX. It's an ABI restriction, hard-coded in several binary formats, NIS restriction, and UNIX interoperability issue. Another limit is the 32-bit character limit from POSIX, but that's been removed, I understand. Don't blame me--I'm just telling you.
Well tried, but I know its your fault!
Tell me about it.
Disclaimer: Evolution comes with NO WARRANTY, except for the IMPLIED WARRANTY of FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Ever since Oracle bought out Sun, they went overboard with the licensing costs for Solaris. Remember a few years back when Sun will let you run Solaris 10 for free? Well no more, if you have a non-Oracle two processor server it will cost you $2,000 per year. You don't own a license, you are basically renting the privilege to run Solaris on a server for one year. Also, you only get one flavor of support which they laughably call "premium". Their support is a joke now, and in my experience the good Sun engineers left a long time ago. For starters, you now get to talk to an overseas helpdesk which logs your call and for severity one issues, they give you a call back in an hour (if you're lucky). It used to be you will call an easy to remember number (1-800-USA-4SUN) and you will get a live transfer to a knowledgeable engineer to fix your problem. A few years ago I used to be a staunch supporter of Sun and Solaris but it seems like Oracle has done everything to drive me away from Sun's hardware and software. I am pretty sure I am not the only one either.
8 chars? Why back in my day we had only 6! And we were glad to have them too! How else would be we able to tell between julia and julian without that sixth character?
And we had to walk fifteen miles to see the sysadmin to get the username, too. In a raging snowstorm! Uphill! Both ways!!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Btrfs? How does it not take data integrity seriously? It supports checksums and redundancy on user data and metadata blocks.
It also has features that ZFS lacks. Defragmentation, shrinking, balancing over adding and removing devices from the pool.
Btrfs is getting close to prime time.
Ah... but these zones go to (Solaris) 11.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
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.
Well, duh. Maybe if Oracle released ZFS under the GPL, it would be in the Linux kernel.
That doesn't explain why no one did a ground-up implementation of ZFS on Linux (there is a public spec) or why no file system designed for Linux itself has taken data integrity at all seriously.
I shouldn't pick on Linux exclusively, though, since neither Microsoft nor Apple seem to care about data integrity in their file systems either. The persistence of NTFS on Windows is just embarrassing.
ZFS development has moved to FreeBSD.
No. No, it has not.
Correct me if I'm wrong but:
* FreeBSD's ZFS is years behind what Illumos offers in features, and shows no signs of catching up.
* The same can be said about hardware support (and by support, I mean drivers which are considered stable) and a generally bug-free implementation. It's largely comparable to btrfs, but less verbose in actually telling you when something fucks up.
* the FreeBSD implementation is still dogged by performance issues. Any significant workload on ZFS is still marginal compared to, well, pretty much anything else (including, dare I say, NTFS on Windows).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
This comment STILL hasn't been modded down? Are there no moderators anymore?
Disclaimer: IANAL. This post is, however, legal advice, and creates an attorney-client relationship.
* FreeBSD's ZFS is years behind what Illumos offers in features, and shows no signs of catching up.
If you know so much about it, would you mind updating the Wikipedia article about ZFS that lists "Notable ZFS storage pool versions" with FreeBSD and Illumos both on 28.
Judging by "ls", "cp" and friends dating back from the dawn of Unix, you had it lucky at six. ~
It's Linux. If you need it, build it.
Arrrgghhhhh! Grow up!!!! That is like dumping someone on a plot of land and telling them if they need a house they should just build it themselves. Not everyone is an architect, master builder, plumber, electrician etc. etc. Nor is everyone capable of writing their own file system software. This argument is not sane and I cannot believe that supposedly intelligent people have continued to make it for many decades now.
Or are you just bored and trolling?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
That's mighty odd. The place I work has hundreds of OSOL servers. I've seen ZFS only flake out once.
That's still once too many.
And still one more than I've ever seen of VxFS. I've managed many, many petabytes of VxFS file systems, and never lost so much as a single file to FS corruption.
(even when I had a coworker manage to import the same VxVM disk group on 2 cluster nodes simultaneously and mount the FS in both places...). A little private region editing and I was able to correct the damage.
FreeBSD's ZFS is years behind what Illumos offers in features, and shows no signs of catching up.
FreeBSD 8-STABLE and 9-RELEASE contain ZFS v28, the same version of ZFS as OpenSolaris. iXSystems is now funding development, and it has seen quite a lot of bug fixes that have yet to be back-ported to any Solaris version.
the FreeBSD implementation is still dogged by performance issues. Any significant workload on ZFS is still marginal compared to, well, pretty much anything else (including, dare I say, NTFS on Windows).
I installed FreeBSD 9 BETA on a machine with three disks in a RAID-Z configuration and the only time the bottleneck for reading and writing to the array was not the GigE connection, was when I was writing to a compressed deduplicated filesystem. Then the CPU was the limit, at about 20-30MB/s. That's with a pretty anaemic CPU (1.6GHz AMD Fusion) and with WITNESS turned on in the kernel, which adds lots of extra error checking around kernel code and slows everything down.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Michael J.
Root, God, what is difference?
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Apple did care, and even had a working version of ZFS on Mac OS X 10.6. However, they were unable to come to licensing terms with Sun at the time, and unceremoniously ripped the project from Mac OS Forge. If you go a-Googling, you can probably still find the release candidate filesystem drivers.
Also, FreeBSD 8+ has an (older) implementation of ZFS, which I believe they pulled from the OpenSolaris and found a way to make it work.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Solaris Zones have been around for years... more stupid "it's new & cloud-based" crap when is just re-marketing their old technology.
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I look forward to your ZFS git commit.