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Operating Systems Oracle

Oracle Solaris 11 Express Released 160

Posted by Soulskill from the long-time-coming dept.
comay writes "Today Oracle released Solaris 11 Express 2010.11. It includes a large number of new features (PDF) not found in either Oracle Solaris 10 or previous OpenSolaris releases, including ZFS encryption and deduplication, network-based packaging and provisioning systems, network virtualization, optimized I/O for NUMA platforms and optimized platform support including support for Intel's latest Nehalem and SPARC T3. In addition, Oracle Solaris 10 support is available from within a container/zone so migration of existing systems is greatly simplified." Reader gtirloni adds, "Oracle also announced that this is not a beta or preview, but a full, supported release aimed at everybody developing, testing, prototyping or demonstrating applications running on the latest Solaris release (not allowed to be used in production)."
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Oracle Solaris 11 Express Released More

Oracle Solaris 11 Express Released

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  • Wait, what? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Corporate Troll ( 537873 )
    Wasn't Oracle going to kill all good stuff from Sun according to the slashdot hivemind?

    • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by abigor ( 540274 )

      These are the same people who use words like "good", "evil", "oppression", "abuse" and any number of other meaningless adjectives to describe computer software and the companies who create it.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Zero__Kelvin ( 151819 )
        Yeah, people [slashdot.org] who use the word "evil" when talking about software and related companies [google.com] are clearly ignorant incompetent morons with no idea what they are talking about. I also totally agree with you that "good" and "evil" are meaningless adjectives, that are only included in the dictionary because the companies creating dictionaries specialize in the "abuse" of the English language. Did you know that Google doesn't turn up any results showing "Oppression" as an adjective! So much for their "Do No Evil" s

    • Yes, looks that way to me... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bill, Shooter of Bul ( 629286 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @06:26PM (#34236992) Journal
      This is only allowed to be used in dev. They killed Open Solaris. It certainly seems like they are killing a good part of the *free* stuff from Sun to me.
      • Solaris 11 Express is aimed at people that want to preview the features that will come in full production mode in Solaris 11. But they are also offering support for the Express edition today (the license terms are kind of cryptic, as always). I can't see how Oracle is killing Solaris no matter how hard I try to imagine that.

        • Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:5, Informative)

          by Corporate Troll ( 537873 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @06:35PM (#34237074) Homepage Journal
          He's talking about OpenSolaris... The open source branch. He's right about that, it's effectively been killed.

          • Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:4, Insightful)

            by ToasterMonkey ( 467067 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @10:31PM (#34238712) Homepage

            He's talking about OpenSolaris... The open source branch. He's right about that, it's effectively been killed.

            Technically, that open source branch has not been killed, OpenSolaris the distribution has been rebranded as Solaris Express and supposedly the source will be released following binary releases rather than leading it. There are other projects based on that source that predate OpenSolaris, and then there is OpenIndiana which is supposedly going to be to Solaris as CentOS is to RHEL.
            Something like that anyway.

            All this OpenSolaris is dead talk amuses me. If anyone gave a damn about it, they'd simply be waiting for Solaris Express 11 that was announced when OS "died" or working with the other community driven Solaris distros with real communities. If you don't give a damn... what's this all about?

            • Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:4, Insightful)

              by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @11:06PM (#34238884)

              Illumos is the real future of OpenSolaris IMO.
              Efforts are being made to remove anything from OpenSolaris that is closed source (especially anything with limits on redistribution)

            • If you look at the list of requirements for a program to be Open Source,
              http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd [opensource.org]
              No 6 says "6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor". Saying you can't use it on a production server doesn't appear to comply with that.

              Similarly, the Free Software definition
              http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html [gnu.org]
              Freedom 0 says you should be allowed to run the program for any purpose.

              So yes, I would say OpenSolaris has been killed off and replaced with a demoware program.

            • Re:Solaris 11 will be available in 2011 (Score:4, Insightful)

              by makomk ( 752139 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2010 @07:37AM (#34240678) Journal

              OpenSolaris the distribution has been rebranded as Solaris Express

              With a licence agreement that forbids you from actually using it for anything. Want to use it? You need to pay Oracle a load of money, and they may not even let you do that unless you replace all your hardware with stuff supplied by them.

              • With a licence agreement that forbids you from actually using it for anything. Want to use it? You need to pay Oracle a load of money, and they may not even let you do that unless you replace all your hardware with stuff supplied by them.

                "limited License to use the Programs only for the purpose of developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating your applications, and not for any other purpose."
                I don't know where you are getting "for anything" from, this is in plain, non-legaleze English. If you already pay for Solaris support, AFAIK, this is also covered, and you can use it for whatever, like in a Nexenta for example. My God, they have given you the source to most of it, and there are other community supported binary distributions of t

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by makomk ( 752139 )

                  Is there any reason for not being as grateful for any part of this being free

                  There's a fairly obvious reason not to be grateful. The only things they'll let you do for free are things that are likely to make them money in the immediate future. Am I supposed to be grateful that Oracle have "generously" not charged me for the privilege of allowing me to do things that will help them rake in the cash? Especially as I could do most of them anyway, just via alternative routes that wouldn't make them money.

                  Seriously, what's with the "bow down before your corporate overlords and be gratefu

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by hoggoth ( 414195 )

            I'm putting together a chart of all the different distros and O.S.es that can run ZFS. I'll try to keep it updated with the build numbers and special features of each one:

            http://petertheobald.blogspot.com/2010/11/101-zfs-capable-operating-systems.html [blogspot.com]

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by mysidia ( 191772 )

          They're not killing Solaris as an OS.

          They are in effect killing Solaris as an open platform and making it more like Windows.

    • Wasn't Oracle going to kill all good stuff from Sun according to the slashdot hivemind?

      Well, Oracle Solaris Express only exists because Open Solaris got killed. So, yeah. I think the hive mind pretty much called it on this one. Oracle has been actively, systematically destroying the good name of Sun. What's left is a stinky corpse stuffed full of medical waste that Oracle raped.

    • Re:Wait, what? (Score:4, Funny)

      by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @06:37PM (#34237094)

      Wasn't Oracle going to kill all good stuff from Sun according to the slashdot hivemind?

      The good stuff (TM)(Oracle) is not quite dead yet. It's feeling much better. It thinks it might go for a walk.

      It doesn't want to go on the cart.

      It shouldn't be such a baby!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SETIGuy ( 33768 )

      Wasn't Oracle going to kill all good stuff from Sun according to the slashdot hivemind?

      What does "not allowed to be used in production" mean to you?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      Kill? I suppose it depends on your definition of "kill".

      They did kill OpenSolaris. The code, process, and community was destroyed and made unavailable to the community as a whole; it's now (essentially) freeware/shareware. Support, what's that?

      Thankfully, OSol was forked, and we now have several viable alternatives - a couple of which do what people need 'better' than Solaris itself (ie 'gobs of clustered network storage').

      As for Solaris in general... Solaris, particularly due to ZFS, is the biggest reason

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by keeboo ( 724305 )
      If you want to use the Programs for any purpose other than as permitted under this agreement, including but not limited to distribution of the Programs or any use of the Programs for your internal business purposes (other than developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating your applications) or for any commercial production purposes, you must obtain a valid license permitting such use. We may audit your use of the Programs.

      Well... That does not sound very open to me.

  • Do not want (Score:4, Informative)

    by countSudoku() ( 1047544 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @06:16PM (#34236928) Homepage

    Thanks, Larry. Unfortunately, we're up to our ears in new hardware running virtual instances of Solaris 8 and 9 still. Imagine all that wonderful new crap we could do with Solaris 11? Like hosting Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 forever... Please do something useful like not being a giant IT asshole. Thanks!

    Oh, and great work on Java and OpenOffice! Way to drive off any good developers. Guess you'll need to raise your prices even more to pay for angry junior software engineers to replace freely available, superior talent. Weren't you going to ride a balloon to the sun, or was that Beardy Branson? I get you two confused.

  • Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:5, Informative)

    by Chuck_McDevitt ( 665265 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @06:20PM (#34236954) Homepage
    So, it's a "Full, Supported Release", but we can't use it for anything except as a development platform (and what to deploy on?). From the license agreement: We can't "use the Programs for your own internal business purposes... or for any commercial or production purposes" So in reality, it's just a way to show off, an try to keep people from jumping ship to linux. It's definitely the antithesis of FOSS -- nothing is free about it.
    • Exactly...

      Solaris is dead as fried chicken

    • Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use (Score:5, Insightful)

      by syousef ( 465911 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @06:24PM (#34236982) Journal

      So, it's a "Full, Supported Release", but we can't use it for anything except as a development platform (and what to deploy on?).

      From the license agreement: We can't "use the Programs for your own internal business purposes... or for any commercial or production purposes"

      So in reality, it's just a way to show off, an try to keep people from jumping ship to linux.

      It's definitely the antithesis of FOSS -- nothing is free about it.

      They're just giving away the development tools for free. So when/if developers use them, and end users like the result, they've got you by the short and curlies. It's a time honoured tradition, often rightly or wrongly compared to a drug dealer's "the first hit is free, kid".

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by segedunum ( 883035 )

        They're just giving away the development tools for free. So when/if developers use them, and end users like the result, they've got you by the short and curlies. It's a time honoured tradition, often rightly or wrongly compared to a drug dealer's "the first hit is free, kid".

        Given that Solaris usage has been declining for ten years now, Oracle is pushing Solaris back into an ever higher end niche as a response and those using free development tools have Unix-like alternatives they can use for any purpose i

      • It's a time honoured tradition, often rightly or wrongly compared to a drug dealer's "the first hit is free, kid".

        The president of one of my previous companies fondly compared it to an alien that attaches to your face and you can't get it off.

        • The president of one of my previous companies fondly compared it to an alien that attaches to your face and you can't get it off.

          If an alien attaches to my face, quite frankly, I am not hoping it will "get off". However, that would be a good analogy for what Oracle is doing to their Solaris customers.

      • They're just giving away the development tools for free. So when/if developers use them, and end users like the result, they've got you by the short and curlies. It's a time honoured tradition, often rightly or wrongly compared to a drug dealer's "the first hit is free, kid".

        Another way of looking at it:

        Prospective customer is already a Solaris (or Oracle DB, etc.) shop, and wants a project based on this platform. If the development tools cost a fortune, you might pass up the business.

        That still doesn't excuse Oracle for its shabby treatment of the OpenSolaris community - though Sun was partly to blame with its half-hearted opening of Solaris to begin with. Illumos will be nice to have, but it's going to be a while before they replace the closed code with open code.

    • Re:Full, Supported Release -- CORRECTION (Score:5, Informative)

      by gtirloni ( 1531285 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @06:26PM (#34237002)
      It seems you actually CAN request a support contract for Solaris 11 Express. The issue seems to be that the download from the Oracle Technology Network alone doesn't give you that hability (to use in production). It looks like they should have paid more attention to the wording... the download from OTN shouldn't be used in production but if you want support to use it in production, contact Oracle. This has been pointed out to many people, perhaps they will make that more explicity. The download page also mentions it's a "full supported release".

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by comay ( 979887 )
      Yes, it's a commercial product. And like many commercial products, it's available free for evaluation or for use by developers. However if you wish to deploy it on your production server, you should be obtaining a support contract (which if you're serious about production is probably a good idea anyway.)

      • "Yes, it's a commercial product. And like many commercial products, it's available free for evaluation or for use by developers. However if you wish to deploy it on your production server, you should be obtaining a support contract"

        No, that's not about support contracts. You need an usage license.

        "which if you're serious about production is probably a good idea anyway."

        Which you'll get *on top* of your usage license.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Chuck_McDevitt ( 665265 )
        Solaris, for a while, was free to use. Now it has become not free. For a while, they (Sun) were trying to make it open-source, now (Oracle) they are reversing that. I would buy a support contract if I was running real, important, production work. But, If I want to run a low-priority internal server, or a small external web app, I can't see it worth the support contract, so I'll just go with Linux. If not free, I'll go with Windows for many uses (yes, Windows does work in real-life applications).

    • So in reality, it's just a way to show off, an try to keep people from jumping ship to linux. It's definitely the antithesis of FOSS -- nothing is free about it.

      Oh, an enemy of Linux is an enemy of FOSS, is that your argument? Do we care?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Chuck_McDevitt ( 665265 )
        I dont really care about that... I care I can't use it for anything useful. So what is the point, and why should I be happy about this "release"?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by makomk ( 752139 )

        Oh, an enemy of Linux is an enemy of FOSS, is that your argument? Do we care?

        No, it's the antithesis of FOSS because not only is it closed source, it has a Field of Use restriction preventing you from doing anything useful with it - and if you want the restriction removed, you have to pay Oracle a small fortune every year.

  • Someone must die (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Capt.DrumkenBum ( 1173011 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @06:22PM (#34236974)
    I am sitting here trying to take a short break from fighting with MySQL on Solaris, and I find that Oracle has released Solaris 11, with Encrypted ZFS, something that I have needed for over a year. I think I will get out my bow, and hunt down Larry, he must pay. Or maybe I will just install Linux on this box and be happy.

  • Minor quibble... (Score:5, Informative)

    by trims ( 10010 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @06:26PM (#34236998) Homepage

    Yes, you can't use the free download version for any production use. It's really annoying, and severely limits the usefulness of S11 Express.

    However, note that if you have an Oracle Premium Support contract (all Oracle Support is Premium ;-), then you have an entitlement to use S11 Express in a production environment, and receive normal support for it, just like you have an RTU and Support for Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris 10 via the same contract.

    This is just an FYI - I'm not commenting on the utility or "goodness" of S11Express.

    -Erik

  • I'm glad to see some positive news coming from Oracle. Solaris is a great OS and I'm thankful that I can keep using it for free on my servers at home.

    Now if we could also get full ZFS support for Linux, that would be great.

  • First there's Red Hat's "Linux by the pound" announcement and then this humdinger. I'm ready to learn .NET.

    Sadly, I'm only half joking....

    • I reconsider my hasty comment. They do allow use for internal development purposes. It's not free as in beer, but that's actually not too bad.

  • "The Open Source and Its Enemies" ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @06:33PM (#34237052)

    How come when an Oracle story gets posted these days, I think of Karl Popper's work . . . ?

  • From the license (Score:5, Informative)

    by rrossman2 ( 844318 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @06:59PM (#34237234)

    You may not:
    - use the Programs for your own internal business purposes (other than developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating your applications) or for any commercial or production purposes;
    - remove or modify any program markings or any notice of our proprietary rights;

    - make the Programs available in any manner to any third party;

    - use the Programs to provide third-party training;

    - assign this agreement or give or transfer the Programs or an interest in them to another individual or entity;

    - cause or permit reverse engineering (unless required by law for interoperability), disassembly or decompilation of the Programs;

    - disclose results of any benchmark test results related to the Programs without our prior consen

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hxnwix ( 652290 )

      disclose results of any benchmark test results related to the Programs without our prior consent

      Oracle has never had any faith in their own products, and when they pretend to by offering performance bounties and such, they are burned badly.

  • So if you work for an organisation that has been drinking the VMWare Koolaid and wants to virtualize everything from their servers to their dekstops to their network firewalls/appliances how does Solaris x86 play under ESX?

    The old advantage of the IBMs and the Oracles of "it is our software, our OS running on our hardware supported by our services business" is being eroded a bit by the desire to drop anything and everything into the same ESX farm...

    • I'm guilty of drinking that ESX koolaid, but only because it tastes sooooooo gooood. I wonder sometimes if I'll be killed in the end by some poison.

  • Yesterday's News (Score:5, Insightful)

    by segedunum ( 883035 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @07:05PM (#34237290)
    Solaris had it's shot at being something the Slashdot crowd could pick up and run with, but given that you can't use Solaris for anything useful now I'm not sure how this qualifies as news. Solaris is now a very high-end OS that's as relevant to people as AIX is, because that's the only feasible place it can survive now.

    • Re:Yesterday's News (Score:4, Informative)

      by SigmundFloyd ( 994648 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @09:19PM (#34238302)

      Solaris is now a very high-end OS that's as relevant to people as AIX is

      Actually, it's 17 times less relevant than AIX, at least in the Top 500 [top500.org].

    • Re:Yesterday's News (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ToasterMonkey ( 467067 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @10:36PM (#34238742) Homepage

      Solaris had it's shot at being something the Slashdot crowd could pick up and run with, but given that you can't use Solaris for anything useful now I'm not sure how this qualifies as news. Solaris is now a very high-end OS that's as relevant to people as AIX is, because that's the only feasible place it can survive now.

      Why, because it's not "cool" or it doesn't meet some technical criteria? Is there really no space between IBM midrange hardware running AIX and the "Slashdot crowd"?
      I'm thinking that's a shockingly large amount of space.

  • Sparc T3? Interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blind biker ( 1066130 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @08:22PM (#34237906) Journal

    I lost touch with Sun microprocessor development since I left my life as an IT/Unix specialist behind me, a couple of years ago. I am pleasantly surprised to learn that Sun engineers have been working at it, though, and have produced a rather intriguing architecture with 16 cores and 8 HW threads per core. That's pretty fucking impressive, methinks, especially since it seems to integrate two 1/10 GB ethernet controllers on die, and the 4 DDR3 channels are not bad to have, either. Anyhow, I think this is the most exciting CPU, for me, of recent years.

  • Time to move to RHEL 6 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mikelieman ( 35628 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @08:29PM (#34237950) Homepage

    There's a wonderfully simple solution to this. Time to move off them expensive SPARC boxes...

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by comay ( 979887 )
      No need to do that. Oracle Solaris 11 Express runs very well on x86 systems as well. In fact, it's a lot more scalable as a single-node system than many other OSs and the driver support in the new release is much improved over earlier Solaris release.

  • Oracle has over 300,000 customers of it's products. Sun had 30,000. I think the future looks bright for commercial Solaris. At the end of the day someone has to pay for the R&D that leads to innovation and Oracle knows how to sell software and make money. It's called capitalism and it's what pays everyone's salaries. And it's because of this that we will see more innovations like ZFS and DTrace.

    This is a good thing as competition always benefits everyone including open source.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by yuhong ( 1378501 )

      Yep, quotes from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/08/sun_bonuses_ibm/ [theregister.co.uk] :
      "However, IBM operates in the real world of profit and loss, and sources told The Reg categorically that IBM failed to get a satisfactory answer on which, if any, of Sun's software makes money."
      "Only if Sun accepts the full facts, and quits playing the kind of Silicon Valley game that has given Web 2.0 services like Digg ridiculous assumed valuations based on nothing more than number or users and potential future revenues can Sun's o

  • During installation on a V100 it requested the date and would only accept year values 1900-1999.

    Oddly, after reboot it's now displaying the proper date.

  • How long until the ZFS features are ported to BSD? THAT is something I'd be seriously interested in, since I run a production environment on a tight budget and thus cannot use this version of Solaris.

    • The deduplication stuff is already in FreeBSD 9, as is the RAID-Z3. Not sure about the encryption. iSCSI support is still missing, because there is no iSCSI target in the base system (there's one in NetBSD that looks stealable though) so you have to go through a couple more steps to export iSCSI volumes.
  • So Oracle lets you taste their OS for free but do not allow you to directly make money out of it. They do however allow you to develop stuff for a customer running Solaris and to make money that way. I don't see any problem whatsoever with this. Sure they may have killed OpenSolaris which they probably owned largely.

    Whaddya want for nothin? Rubber biscuit?

    I myself quit OpenSolaris long ago as the buggy menu-driven admin-tools drove me mad and config file specification were either virtually illegible o

  • Even if it is "free" for personal use, beware. Unless you have an Oracle support contract, you are out of luck if you encounter problems. I'm not sure if outsiders can even file a bug report now, much less get an actual fix in a timely manner.

    Gone are the days of helpful people on Sun's mailing lists who could supply a quick source fix when things go awry. This was a common occurrence on zfs-discuss, and now you will have no recourse whatsoever.

    Solaris Express is a development release, and without the so

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