Oracle Solaris Reviews

I work with Solaris Operating systems since a lot of years, every day, as technical support specialist 

I've worked with different flavors of Unix, but I chose Solaris. I like the constant innovation in the software and hardware.

I've worked with servers E10k, E25k, T7-2, T5, M5, M5-32 and some other older servers. All of them have excellent performance in virtualization, zones, and LDOMs.

Solaris lets you isolate zones and migrate them to other servers. You can also move old releases of OS's from obsolete hardware to containers installed in new hardware.

The most valuable features for me are:

Virtualization (Containers, Zones, Security, PDOM's, LDOM's)

Performance, ZFS, Debugging with Dtrace

There are some areas that could use some improvement. As with Solaris 10, you can install Solaris 11 on SPARC and x86 systems, but the number of non-Oracle x86 systems certified up to this point is less that with the previous version. In spite of that, you can still install Solaris 11 on a varied number of systems as 'bare metal' or you can resort to virtualization via many of the softwares available for that in the market. The certification of third-party hardware is usually a lengthy process and requires a lot of resources, so it would be understandable if this takes a long time.

More than 20 years.

Solaris is very stable, and most of the "panics" are caused by third-parties, generally when information security applications add modules into the kernel or when some hardware failure occurs.

Oracle Sparc servers are the best for scalability. With Solaris, for example ZFS, it's a filesystem of 128 bits that allows storage of 256 trillion zettabytes, metadata are assigned dynamically, so it's not necessary to assign nodes beforehand or to limit the filesystem scalability when it's created. The directory can have up to 256 billion entries and there isn't a limit to the number of filesystem or file that may be in ZFS.

Customer Service:

Customer Service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, by phone and web services where you can open a case, upload files, and an engineer can be assigned in less 3 hours depending on severity of the case.

Technical Support:

The technical staff and field engineers who interact with customers are really professional, capable, have very good dispositions and they work with a high level of excellence.

I worked on various Unix systems, but I feel very comfortable working on Solaris. I'm aware of the evolution of Linux systems in the world because of the cost, but I don't feel the need to change for the time because this OS offers me compatibility and scalability that the company needs where I work.

When I decided the work on the Solaris platform, it was a personal decision. I didn't stop other Unix systems becuase of the complexity of these OS's, but rather by a timely challenge I had to build a cluster between 2 nodes of SunFire 6800. After that the E25k servers arrived and then the virtualization , and I liked working on Solaris more each time.

When we do an implementation, we work together with an Oracle team and my colleague, Nicolas, and I start by connecting the power cords to the installation and configure the OS. We also provide support to development teams to this applications.

About the level of technicians, the level is excellent and they all provide great value with their experience

The economic investment is not my area of expertise, but I can talk about investment if I think about everyday learning working on this OS which return me the invest time on the initial installation and the low administrative maintenance, so I can spend less time to solve problems that software and hardware can have.

I can't talk about prices. Solaris is free for final users, and in the case of OEM licenses, you should visit www.oracle.com.

I always evaluate other options with Sparc. I analyze if one server is more convenient than another or what cards to add. At my company, one specific area evaluates the costs of an implementation and then it decides the direction to take, so when the road leads to Solaris, my evaluation can help them to make a decision.

I always recommend Solaris because of its robustness, high availability, scalability, virtualization, excellent support, security and very good hardware.

We are using Oracle Solaris for an external data center. We switched to Oracle Solaris because we outsourced Oracle to a third party and they went from Oracle Linux to Solaris because of license issues with Oracle Linux. We had to then go over as well for some functionality reasons, such as to do hard partitioning. We were able to minimize the number of CPU cores available for Oracle Linux which help save money because we did not have to pay full price.

We do not use Solaris in general terms because we are end-users, we are an application service provider. We have an external party that delivers us an Oracle database and the platform underneath the Oracle database is agnostic to us. We do not care about it as long as we have an Oracle database running. My team, which are technicians, is completely not involved in the Solaris platform. We just have an Oracle database running where a third party takes care of it, and they choose Solaris because of license issues.

When we switch over to Solaris it was not easy because we had some troubles with the performance. Solaris is from Oracle and you would expect that it would run flawlessly, but we had some issues in sizing the previous Linux environment to the Solaris environment.

I have been using this solution for approximately one year.

The stability of the solution is good.

Oracle Solaris is scalable. However, this depends on the hardware that is running in the environment but this is not the fault of the solution if the hardware is not adequate.

Our standard platform is VMware and Oracle Solaris runs fine on VMware, but if you have VMware running on it, you do not get support.

I have used Oracle and Red Hat Linux previously.

The initial setup is straightforward.

If you have a 20 or 30-core CPU underneath Oracle, they expect you to pay for all the cores, although the VM only has assigned a couple of them. They are very difficult license-wise and that is the reason why we went to Oracle Solaris. We were presented this option by our external advisor to prohibit extensive Oracle Linux costs.

We have a lot of government organizations here in Holland leaving Oracle. It is not a bad solution, it is a perfect solution because we have used it for more than 25 years and have never lost one record. It is technically a good solution, but the licensing and sales issues, people are really annoyed about and many Dutch organizations are going over to other solutions. For example, Postgres databases or EnterpriseDB, which is a commercial version of Postgres. They are more cost-efficient if you speak to sales teams.

The price is not good and needs to improve. What was surprising to us was that our Oracle databases run better with fewer resources on Linux than they did on Solaris. We found that strange because if Oracle brings out the new version of their database it is almost always firstly brought out on their own platforms, such as Solaris. You would expect that Solaris would work the best. However, in our case, it did not, there is something wrong with the resources in Solaris.

I have evaluated the Postgres database and Enterprise database.

I would prefer Linux then Oracle Solaris because it is more open. If you are in a commercial environment, then use a commercial Linux version, not a free version. We have seven customers using Red Hat, the support is very good, and there are hardly any issues.

I will not recommend Solaris because of the attitude of Oracle, what we have experienced in the database, how they handle licenses, and legally. They are not a company that is fair and are very aggressively trying to get money. However, they provide a solid solution.

I rate Oracle Solaris a nine out of ten.

We use Oracle Solaris to develop and support our VDCF (Virtual Datacenter Cloud Framework) management software. Several virtual machines (LDoms and Zones) are used on SPARC and x86 Servers.

We are able to deploy new environments very quickly and securely. Using the virtualization features, we can migrate the environments very flexibly between our servers.

Solaris includes two virtualization solutions: LDoms for SPARC and Solaris Zones. Both solutions can be combined to create private clouds. Solaris Zones is ideal to separate applications and to migrate from older to current hardware. LDoms is very efficient because it uses the hardware hypervisor of the SPARC servers.
Both technologies increase Security, because they separate the applications from each other. Using the Security Compliance Framework we are sure the systems are setup properly

Patching without downtime would be nice.

Update 08/2021: Live Paching of Kernel is now available. We applied IDRs successfully on several servers.

More than ten years!

We had no issues with the stability.

Solaris is very robust and scalable. No issues so far scaling it.

Oracle offers a good online support portal called "My Oracle Support", which includes a big knowledge base. Because Oracle is a very large organization, it sometimes takes a bit too much time for support requests to reach the right support engineer.

Used Solaris 10 before, but Solaris 11 is much easier and faster with patching.
Based on BootEnvironments and ZFS Solaris 11 always offers a failback.

The initial setup is straightforward. Oracle has in-depth admin manuals. To speed up deployments, we implemented our own deployment and management framework VDCF.

We implemented it with our in-house team based on Oracle's best practices documents. With virtualization, we recommend to first define a standard on how to deploy and then to deploy using that standard, avoiding any variation. There are so many options, but our favorite is the fully-virtualized LDom with applications installed into Solaris Zones.

When buying a server from Oracle, all the software is included -- OS, virtualization and patches. There are no hidden costs. We like the long life cycle of Solaris and the SPARC servers. There's no need to replace the hardware every two to three years, and we have a life cycle of five years and more.

Use deployment tools for automation and avoid doing everything manually. Deployment tools help to avoid errors and create a standardized environment.

We are using the solution for multiple purposes. We are using it, for example, for our local environment, and we are using it for our core banking. We even use it for our database and a lot of other things.

The reliability of the solution is excellent.

The security has been very good overall.

We've found the solution to have good availability.

The backup capabilities are quite good.

The solution has proven to be quite stable so far.

The product can scale.

The solution is 100% free to use. It doesn't cost a company anything as it's embedded in the hardware.

I haven't had any big issues with the solution. Largely, I've been very happy with it. 

Sometimes we get stuck for security reasons. There's an issue with either the filing or use management. However, largely it just comes down to a lack of experience and over time, users get the hang of it. 

It would be helpful if the solution offered backend management. In the 11.4 version, Oracle added a management console. It would be great if we maybe had a user management tool to go with it.

I've been using the solution for a long time. It's been about 11 years. It's over a decade at this point.

The stability has been very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable.

The solution can scale, however, it depends on the need. Whenever we require an extension we go for that.

Our whole IT department is currently on the solution.

We're quite satisfied both with technical support and the product itself. Support, for example, is responsive, however, we have a very low number of calls with Oracle due to the fact that we find this application very stable.

We have a pretty complex environment and therefore had a pretty complex setup.

You don't have to pay a licensing fee. The solution is free to use. It's bound with the hardware.

We are just customers and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with Oracle.

I would 100% recommend the solution to other organizations. The solution has been quite reliable and secure. For an enterprise environment, it's a great product.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I used Oracle Solaris in business. There are customers that need to backup their Oracle Solaris servers. I would help integrate a solution, such as Veeam, which has an agent for Solaris to backup the Solaris operating system.

Oracle Solaris was the preferred operating system for their customers to run their databases on and to get the best performance. It performs well with Oracle applications. Additionally, there are some features inside that are called zones which are Linux containers.

Oracle Solaris is a Unix-based operating system. People used to call it Slowaris because it was very slow. However, they have different CPU architectures. You can use Solaris also on a normal server x86. Additionally, they have their own CPU architecture, which is called Oracle SPARC architecture. I believe before Oracle was using Oracle Linux, they were using Oracle Solaris for their customers who are using Oracle databases. This was because it was more optimized for the hardware built for it. It has good performance for the database only. However, if you take it out of the Oracle applications, it will not do well compared to other operating systems, such as Linux or even Windows can have better performance.

I have been using Oracle Solaris for a couple of months.

I have used Oracle Linux.

You either buy Oracle Solaris to install it on your hardware, or you get the hardware. Most of the people making the right decision would get the hardware with the SPARC-based architecture.

I did the installation of Oracle Solaris in a lab at home. I did some very small tests. It installs similar to a Linux or Unix installation, they all have the same procedure. It was not complex for me but it would be for others without experience.

I did the implementation of the solution.

This solution needs a license to use it.

If you downloaded Oracle databases you could use this solution but there are better solutions, such as Oracle Linux. Linux has proven to be better performance than Solaris in many aspects. If you approach Oracle and ask them, which one you should use Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux, they would say Oracle Linux.

I rate Oracle Solaris a seven out of ten.

We primarily use Solaris for compute storage. It is a server product that runs databases.

Our current equipment that Oracle Solaris runs on is approximately five years old and I only deal with it occasionally. This is a legacy product for us now and times have moved on.

This product handles databases well; they run on top of the operating system.

This product is not as flexible as other similar solutions on the market today. Times have moved on and there are newer operating systems that are better to use and more compatible with current technology.

I began working with Oracle Solaris between 15 and 16 years ago.

This is a stable product.

We've moved to other products recently, so scalability is no longer an issue for us. That said, the legacy version was slightly fixed.

We had approximately 25,000 end-users in some form or another.

We used to deal with technical support for this product. However, because it's older and things have not been changing, we have not had any recent experience with them.

When we were installing this product, it was straightforward. We haven't installed one in a while. It used to be maintained by our network team but as it's now a legacy product for us, we do not have dedicated staff to take care of it.

We were implementing this product with our in-house team.

There are no licensing fees but you can opt to pay for support.

The suitability of this product depends on the use case. There are other products that are more flexible and better to use these days. It was stable, so I would recommend it for some cases but more often than not, we wouldn't use it anymore.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

It is used for Oracle applications and Oracle Database.

It works well. It is very stable and very good. 

It is also very safe. It cannot be easily infected by viruses or attacks.

It is not easy to use. It doesn't have a user-friendly interface. It should be easy to use. We are planning to move from Solaris to Linux because Linux is more flexible and user-friendly. Its installation should also be easier. 

Solaris also needs specific hardware to work well, which is another reason why we are moving to Linux. It should be more flexible in terms of hardware. It should have better integration with other hardware platforms.

I have been using Oracle Solaris for ten years.

It is very stable. We didn't have to do any maintenance on it.

It is scalable. We have approximately 120 users.

We are also using Windows Server 2012.

Its installation is not easy. It was installed a long ago. It didn't take a long time.

We get external support for installation, implementation, or maintenance. They have a team of three or four technical people.

Its licensing is on a yearly basis.

I would recommend this solution. It is stable and safe but not easy to use. It is very good for Oracle applications.

I would rate Oracle Solaris a seven out of ten.