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

Cloud hosting

[nepka]

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.

Re:Cloud hosting

[hawguy]

What platform are you running Solaris on? Last time I ran it on an x86 platform (which admittedly was over 6 years ago), performance under load was worse than a comparable Linux box. (at the time, I blamed it on the NIC drivers).

i thought the whole point of cloud servers was that when the load peaks, it's easy to spin up additional servers, so it doesn't really matter what the performance of any individual server is?

How is Azure a fallback for Solaris+Cloud hosting? If you have a Solaris cloud that is scalable and reliable, why do you need an Azure fallback?

But generally, scalable cloud hosting really is good for hosting big traffic sites.

But why is Solaris more suitable to having cloud hosted servers than Linux? While I can see why Solaris zones would make my own private cloud easier to implement, I can have a script spin up EC2 Linux instances on demand and have them serving traffic within minutes. Why would Solaris be any better at that?

Re:Cloud hosting

[asdf7890]

Part of the price you pay covers a little pack of IOPS that comes in the box. If you go for a two year support deal they throw in a few MHz too.

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

[ILongForDarkness]

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. Tech is like choosing a car and saying I don't drive trucks trucks suck. Well it depends. Solaris/SPARC might be slow on single threaded apps but high concurrency they kick butt. They are a tractor trailer where as linux might be a Porche. Both are worth about the same but have different features and limitations. Best to use the right tool for the job rather than get all religious on means of delivery, techinical implementation, or one area of performance. I realize other vendors equipment might have it now but I seem to recall back in the day (not dinosaur era but maybe 1995) finding out that you could hot swap CPUs on a Sun box. That's crazy. Maybe other people can do that but it is typical of Solaris as a whole, it is very very rare that you need to restart a Solaris box usually if you do it is a 3rd party device manufacturer that causes the reboot (a FC card that just insists on restart because so crazy reason it doesn't work properly after being bounced in the OS for example). That is pretty cool stuff. Whether it is worth the money and relatively small user base/app base is up to the usage scenario.

Re:Cloud hosting

[TheRaven64]

When things are light Linux may be more responsive, but I've found it gets bogged down when the going gets tough

I'm astonished at how bad Linux is under load. My former university's computer society has had to reboot their Linux server several times over the last couple of months because Apache + PHP managed to completely kill it with what was effectively a fork bomb (a little bit more complicated, lots of short-lived processes were being created). I thought that kind of thing didn't happen with modern operating systems. Even OS X hasn't been susceptible to that kind of thing since 10.5 (10.4 was pretty easy to kill).

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.

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.

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.

[ralphart]

Ever seen the Dementers in the Harry Potter films? Larry Ellison was the model. In terms of Corporate Evil, Oracle is the Prince of Fucking Darkness. They make Microsoft look like a bunch of panty-waists.

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.

I only use real Unix, not fake crap like Linux

[jmcbain]

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).

Re:8 char usernames

[corbettw]

Jeez, only a complete loser would have an 8-character user name.

I agree completely

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

Re:Solaris is good as dead

[afabbro]

How exactly has Oracle "messed up" VirtualBox?

$1,000/year per CPU for non-Oracle hardware

[Bluecobra]

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.

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:Nothing to see here

[JDG1980]

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.

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.