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."

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: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.

Re:What Sun built in goodwill, Oracle destroys.

[the linux geek]

I think I have. I've seen that the "latest and greatest" SPARC64 VII+ still gets regularly spanked by Power7 and Itanium and even commodity systems in performance, despite being considerably more expensive - and I've seen vague roadmaps for the future of M-Series. I've seen that the T1/T2/T3 performance promises never really panned out (see: SPEC results vs the much cheaper Magny-Cours), and that the T4 has so far largely been hidden behind the veil of vague benchmark-fu while being far more expensive than its competitors.

What hardware have I been missing?

Re:Nothing to see here

[JDG1980]

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.

Re:Cloud hosting

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Worth checking out at least; works reasonably well in a VM (vmware-tools are available last I checked).

Generally I've found Solaris to be better under load that Linux (been using both for at least a decade). When things are light Linux may be more responsive, but I've found it gets bogged down when the going gets tough. On average I've experienced at least one live-lock a year with Linux, but have never with Solaris (even on an Sun Ultra 10 with a load avg of over 300 I could still get in and fix things). I also like the fact that by default Solaris doesn't overcommit memory, so the whole OOM Killer thing becomes moot (ran some Linux-based Perforce servers that this was a semi-regular problem).

I'm doing Linux sysadmin full time now, but do miss many small things from Solaris (kstat, good man pages), especially version 10+ (DTrace, ZFS).

To each his own.

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?

The better each individual server performs, the less you have to pay for more of them.

$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:Nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Cloud hosting

[syousef]

I know it is the usual thing to hate on slashdot

No, it is usual for people who frequent slashdot to hate companies and products that have made some portion of their life miserable. The hate is not random.

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: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:*crickets chirping*

[CAIMLAS]

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).

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).