Anyone using Solaris????

[laxmanb]

just asking!

[cmat]

It's actually pretty good.

[toupeiro]

Yes, and Lots of it.

I don't necessarily choose to play World of Warcraft on it, but I'll put any SQL or oracle database of any size on Solaris 10 running on a t2000 sunfire box and watch it blow the doors off everything else in competition with it.

Sun Microsystems just announced two pretty huge deals with IBM and Google. They aren't losing any ground by a long shot.

Nexenta is pretty damn impressive too.

[fistfullofroses]

Not only is Solaris amazing, but the fact that it is now open source is pretty awesome. Solaris was blazingly fast when I tried it, but the lack of maturity the system has is a drawback. The kernel needs time in the open source world to gain acceptance, and developers. After it does so, it will be rather sweet, and may make me leave linux behind.

[jinx099]

I am highly interested in Solaris, but cant seem to figure it out as it is now. Anyone have any links on how to get a good solaris server running?

Project Indiana sounds like its going to be awesome. If it becomes all it's cracked up to be, Linux will be in serious trouble!

[dptxp]

Not only is Solaris amazing, but the fact that it is now open source is pretty awesome. Solaris was blazingly fast when I tried it, but the lack of maturity the system has is a drawback. The kernel needs time in the open source world to gain acceptance, and developers. After it does so, it will be rather sweet, and may make me leave linux behind.

It is very nice of SUN to make Solaris Open Source.
Has Bill found any patent infringement in Solaris ?

[toupeiro]

Solaris is actually extremely mature. Its been around for a very long time, and is known in the business world for its rock solid performance. THe immaturity comes in the ability for people to openly develop for it. I for one hope sun doesn't bend to developers and compromise the foundation that Solaris is known so well for. People will eventually learn to write applications for solaris the way it is, and I think you are right, it will be extremely sweet!

As far as good tutorials, if you can learn about the disk partitioning and software raid, then the rest is pretty standard UNIX. I guess a good place to start would be suns knowledgebase. :)

The Nexenta installation, based on OpenSolaris, is pretty damn easy. Easier than any version of solaris before it. If you can install linux without the luxury of an X-server, you can tackle NexentaOS pretty easily.

[laxmanb]

I'm using Solaris Express Developer Edition 05/07. There were a few drivers missing, but I found them easily. It's pretty good - and a lot like Linux on the outside (slightly diff. GNOME [Nimbus is cooler than Human], Totem, Rythmbox, StarOffice.... ).

I really wish they'd have open sourced it earlier - we would had greater driver support and much better developer support (though quite a few linux applications just need a recompile to work on Solaris)

And Sun have a patent treaty with Microsoft (.NET possibly infringes on some Java patents, GNOME/StarOffice infringe on some Windows/Office patents)

[fistfullofroses]

the maturity i was mentioning is this- Solaris was made for Sparc and other Sun systems. On the x86 there is not much hardware support, and programs are sparse in comparison to Linux systems.

[angryfirelord]

If you don't find Solaris's package mangement system to your liking, you can always try Nexenta (http://www.gnusolaris.org).

[init1]

I've used Belenix though.
http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/

[AcworthJack]

Nope - would not use it and I don't expect Sun to around much longer -- what is there stock at? Oh yeah - about the same as a cup of coffee!

[toupeiro]

Nope - would not use it and I don't expect Sun to around much longer -- what is there stock at? Oh yeah - about the same as a cup of coffee!

Uhh.. you might want to do a little more research before you make statements like that, and follow suns business trends. They've pulled themselves from the ashes and have one of brightest outlooks amongst technology companies.

Suns signed more breakthrough deals than any other Software/hardware vendor has this year. They've set more benchmarks in the business industry than any other company. My employer is in the top ten fortune 500 companies and we aren't ditching Sun at all.. In fact, more companies are turning to them for software AND x64 hardware!

I'd consider a new advisor.
(http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=SUN) Zoom out for a 2000 - 2007 outlook...

[AcworthJack]

Uhh.. you might want to do a little more research before you make statements like that, and follow suns business trends. They've pulled themselves from the ashes and have one of brightest outlooks amongst technology companies.

Suns signed more breakthrough deals than any other Software/hardware vendor has this year. They've set more benchmarks in the business industry than any other company. My employer is in the top ten fortune 500 companies and we aren't ditching Sun at all.. In fact, more companies are turning to them for software AND x64 hardware!

I'd consider a new advisor.
(http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=SUN) Zoom out for a 2000 - 2007 outlook...

It's a free country - and everyone is entitled to their opinion. I hope your company does well with its purchases.

I have done my homework and as an OS, HW vendor (or investment) I prefer HP and/or IBM over Sun (SUNW). I would consider Sun for some special SW such as some telecom SW which only runs on Solaris – but not for general computing.

I also like Sunoco, Inc - but my wife prefers Chevron. :)

[fistfullofroses]

Sun used to be one of the biggest players around, and they are returning to that position. Google recently started buying Sun systems. This trend is likely to continue. Sun offers cutting edge hardware for far lower prices than others, and Solaris is one of the best OSes around (as long as you are using Sun hardware). Let's just face it though, Google is one of the most powerful companies around and if they decide Sun is a good deal, others follow.

(I say Google is the most powerful because they control the dissemination of information, not because of the money or anything like that)

[toupeiro]

I also like Sunoco, Inc - but my wife prefers Chevron. :)

LOL! Thank you for correcting me here :-P When I glanced at some of the threads surrounding that ticker something seemed off but I simply assumed I had found the right one! Hopefully next time I will do a little better job researching before I start linking things!

I would agree with you today in reference to IBM and HP for general computing needs because everyone knows them for such needs, and not so much for sun. What a lot of people don't know is that Sun is working closer with AMD and Intel over the last year or two than any other vendor and using stable chipsets that you are likely not going to see in an HP server until at least another generation or two. The result is superior hardware that has been proven in the industry to outperform all competitors in its class. I have 4 Sunfire X4200 servers in a rack next to 4 HP Proliant DL385G2's, all running the same OS at the same release, with the same number, size, and speed of drives and RAM and the same model Opteron CPU. The Suns benchmark faster, run WAY cooler, and pull less power than the HP's. In large datacenters, these are the kind of things that will begin to persuade purchasing power because power has quickly become the most expensive commodity to run a datacenter. Sun and VMWare have also advanced their relationship by leaps and bounds and every X-series server is VMWare certified so its not going to matter whether you run Windows or not. What Sun is doing today is positioning themselves VERY well for the future and companies like Google and IBM have taken notice of that. Their also the first to offer cluster solutions to businesses built for Linux, Solaris, and Windows. Doing your homework is good, but getting your hands on the technology will give you a whole new perspective to add to the perspective you get from reading.

Do I think Sun will have the foothold in the home user world HP does? No, but they are also not targeting that client base, and I was not comparing them to companies like HP and IBM when I made my inital post (and incorrect link). What they are targeting is to be the first choice in the data center for homogeneous computing, and they are well on their way towards positioning themselves for that!

You're right, it is a free country -- and you are completely entitled to your opinions. My opinion (pretty obviously ;-) ) is that Sun will be around quite some time.

[AcworthJack]

I remember in the late 1990's when Sun was doing fantastic and really riding the Internet bubble. They have struggled for a long time but now it seems Sun's business is improving. I think they finished FY07 with a profit - their first in a while. But I would have to see them deliver consistent results for a few quarters before I would want to put a lot of money into Sun products. Of course, this becomes the old "chicken and egg" issue. If no one buys Sun, waiting to see if they are "successful", then they will not be successful.

I also have to believe that their Open Source Solaris work is not generating a lot of profit. While Open Source seemed to work with Java, I still don't see the value (to Sun) of OpenSolaris. Only time will tell. If I was a bit smarter I could probably draw a connection between MS Windows and Sun Solaris and other OS becoming "commodity" products. But I'll leave that heavy mental lifting to someone else.

All the enterprise Server vendors are talking about power and cooling. I don't know enough to intelligently debate HP vs. Sun vs. IBM - but I would suspect they are all working hard on reducing cooling costs.

Of course, funny enough, no one seems to be really working on Storage cooling. I would love to see someone focus on reducing cooling costs in large storage devices.

take it easy,
John

[mips]

I also have to believe that their Open Source Solaris work is not generating a lot of profit. While Open Source seemed to work with Java, I still don't see the value (to Sun) of OpenSolaris. Only time will tell. If I was a bit smarter I could probably draw a connection between MS Windows and Sun Solaris and other OS becoming "commodity" products. But I'll leave that heavy mental lifting to someone else.


Sun is going the same way IBM did. They are no longer just a hardware/OS company. They are making their money out of consultation, support & business integration. IBM went this way a long time ago and doing well at it. I don't see why Sun can't do the same.

I think Sun hardware is top notch. If I had to pick enterprise hardware today it would be limited to three vendors, HP, IBM & Sun. The Sun stuff is also pretty competitave in prize compare to a while back where they were more expensive. I would not hesitate to buy from any of the above vendors.

[pjkoczan]

I use Solaris at work a little. I believe our total supported Solaris box count is about 40 compared to about 150 Windows boxes and almost 900 Linux boxes (and 10 BSD boxes).

Our version is very old, and we do a lot of custom stuff, so my experiences may be skewed a bit, but I've noticed that packaging isn't as well done as it is on Linux, and some things you take for granted (such as automatic readline support) aren't as readily available, though this may be due to the former problem.

That said, Solaris + Sparc hardware is very good. I can compile software on a 1 GHz Sunfire V210 only a little slower than I can on a 3 GHz P4 (granted, they're both a little old, but still, impressive).

[angryfirelord]

I know I'm getting a little off topic here, but I tried Nexenta and was impressed, but it was really slow to boot and shut down. Is this common with other Solaris-based OSs or only Nexenta?

[toupeiro]

Of course, funny enough, no one seems to be really working on Storage cooling. I would love to see someone focus on reducing cooling costs in large storage devices.
John

:) actually.... (http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4500/)

The above solution still uses traditional 3.5" disks.

SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is another way which the industry is trying to optimize disk efficiency.. IMO, disk is disk, and as SAS disks get larger (in capacity) and more widely adopted, storage will become denser, which will bring back cooling problems on a whole new level. What will the failure rate on SAS disk be in dense implementations due to heat? It is a step in the right direction, however on your 1U, 2U and 4U solutions to reduce the amount of heat your servers generate, but time will tell how good of a candidate SAS storage arrays will be for SAN and NAS style implementation. That being said, Storage is not the biggest datacenter caveat from a cooling perspective. multicore 1U boxes with 32GB of ram stacked 42RU high are. You can turn to technology venders only so much here. The rest relies on the admin to do good data center research and practices to support his or her infrastructure.

I know I'm getting a little off topic here, but I tried Nexenta and was impressed, but it was really slow to boot and shut down. Is this common with other Solaris-based OSs or only Nexenta?
In my experiences, Solaris has always been on the slow side to booting but this can also be because of the Solsparc architecture I was using it on. Honestly, Solaris RARELY requires a reboot. I've had servers running for years literally, and there is truth to the longer it runs, the better it runs in respect to solaris. I can't say I see too much of a load time difference in my nexenta implementation as opposed to my ubuntu installation. What kind of hardware are you trying to run it on?

[angryfirelord]

In my experiences, Solaris has always been on the slow side to booting but this can also be because of the Solsparc architecture I was using it on. Honestly, Solaris RARELY requires a reboot. I've had servers running for years literally, and there is truth to the longer it runs, the better it runs in respect to solaris. I can't say I see too much of a load time difference in my nexenta implementation as opposed to my ubuntu installation. What kind of hardware are you trying to run it on?
Nothing old, a Sempron 3400+ with 1GB RAM. However, I think since Nexenta is an alpha release, there are debugging tools switched on, which will slow anything down.

But yes, I've been doing some reading and it seems both Solaris and BSD have rock solid uptimes for years. Haven't seen the same for Linux. :p

I also loaded BeleniX and that was much faster to load, but it wouldn't run on my laptop.

[pjkoczan]

On the topic of Sun hardware, where I work recently got a Sun Blade 6000 cluster (http://www.sun.com/servers/blades/6000/). Actually, we got 3 of them (30 machines total), and they are impressive, pretty pieces of hardware.

The power supples, LAN, and service processors/LOM are all modular, as are each of the machines itself. And...the machines are impressive...Dual Quad-Core 2.33 GHz Xeons, 32 GB RAM, Two 10,000 RPM, 150 GB SAS disks. We're running 64-bit CentOS Linux on these nodes, and wow, they are just crazy good.

Sun certainly knows how to put together a good cluster.

[jacob01]

can solaris read exe's natively without wine

does it have its own pacage like exe or the debian .deb

[sloggerkhan]

We use solaris at my work on 2 servers. I hate it. Hideous GUI (possibly because they use citrix?) no bash (they use tcsh or something stupid), and no user local install/compiles, so the only text editor is vi. No package management. Really a pain in the but. (Most of that I think has more to do with how it's set up at my job than with being solaris.)

[angryfirelord]

can solaris read exe's natively without wine

does it have its own pacage like exe or the debian .deb
No silly, exe is for Windows. Gotta use wine.

Package management in Solaris, well, sucks. That's why blastwave.org came about and made it a little better.
We use solaris at my work on 2 servers. I hate it. Hideous GUI (possibly because they use citrix?) no bash (they use tcsh or something stupid), and no user local install/compiles, so the only text editor is vi. No package management. Really a pain in the but. (Most of that I think has more to do with how it's set up at my job than with being solaris.)
The GUI you're looking at is CDE. It's supposed to be hideous. ;-) However, Sun ships with the Java Desktop Environment (a.k.a. Gnome), so at the login screen, see if you can change it there.

[shynko]

Little off topic but has anyone gotten a dual boot setup with ubuntu and solaris. If so is it hard:confused::confused:

[angryfirelord]

Little off topic but has anyone gotten a dual boot setup with ubuntu and solaris. If so is it hard:confused::confused:
You have to copy the menu.lst off of one and put it in another.

[shynko]

You have to copy the menu.lst off of one and put it in another.

thanks for the info:)