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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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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