Oracle Solaris Reviews

I'm a distributor who provides Oracle Solaris virtualization solutions to about 100 customers. I'm with the biggest distributor of Sun Microsystems. 

It's stable.

Solaris is not easy to use. It needs better GUI, UI, and configuration tools.

I've been using Oracle Solaris for 16 years.

Solaris is scalable because they have their own file system, like CFS.

Oracle support is getting better.

Installation is complex and it takes up to two days. To install and configure Solaris to meet the average customer's requirements takes two or three engineers.

Licensing for Solaris is normally on a yearly basis.

I would rate Solaris eight out of 10.

We are using the solution as an operating system for some of our charging systems.

One of the main features of this solution is the ease of use.

I have been using the solution for approximately ten years.

The solution is stable.

The scalability of the solution is good and we have approximately 10 users using it.

The technical support was satisfactory.

We used a vendor team to do the implementation of the solution.

There should be an option to install the solution for free and just pay for the support. We purchased an annual license and the price could be better.

We are going to continue using the solution in the future and I recommend it to others.

I rate Oracle Solaris a seven out of ten.

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.

I have worked for multiple large enterprise environments and one small environment.

I have touched every Solaris OS from 2.5.1 to Solaris 11.4. In my time, I have maintained Sparc 10 workstations and M8 servers, as well as everything in between.

Businesses I have worked for include Manufacturing (large SAP and Oracle DB shops), Outsourcing, Military, and Logistics companies.

I have extensive knowledge of how the OS performs and its capabilities.  

We were able to use zones to reduce the hardware footprint by seventy percent in my time at one company. Using zones, we're also able to automate our entire DR process, taking it from a twelve-hour Recovery time (with three people) to a forty-minute Recovery Time (with one person).

The ability to manipulate the zones and the files within the zones from a global OS provides us flexibility that no other virtualization can match.

The most valuable features are the Zones, ZFS, UAR, ABEs, pkg and the entire network stack.

I love the way you can create virtual NICs in the local zones and maintain all of your zpools in that local zone as well. The ability to use ABEs as a back-out for changes is invaluable.

The Unified archives for system-builds and OS backups, to be used in the event of a major issue, has also served us well. This capability has saved us countless hours of potential downtime during our change windows, as we were able to recover a host within five minutes.  

Marketing and communication efforts need to be improved. Many in this world think Solaris is dead or dying. This idea has to be stopped and even reversed in order for Solaris to regain market share. Solaris is one of the best OSs out there today, and everyone seems to think it's going away. If Oracle spent more time informing people of what they're doing WITH Solaris vs laying off their developers then we would see a lot more people adopting this superior OS.

This is one of the most stable Operating systems on the market.

Solaris is extremely scalable, both vertically and horizontally.

Oracle customer service is slow at times. I typically find my solution before they do. This is not to say they aren't helpful, rather I just have a better time finding answers than they do.

I did not work with another solution prior to choosing this one.

This solution is very straightforward and simple, even for a Linux admin.

This solution was implemented in-house.

Not sure I have ever put a number to it, but we save a lot of man-hours because we run Solaris.

Just look into it. You'll find that this is one of the lower-cost solutions out there. There is no OS licensing cost if you use their hardware and purchase hardware maintenance.

I did not evaluate other options.

I would suggest that you test it in your environment. Start small and see what it can do, and reach out to me for any help. You'll see it is a solid solution that more people should adopt.

Oracle Solaris has inspired my professional artificial intelligence system and research activity for a new operating system dedicated and focused on cybersecurity.

The System Management facility helps the administration of my development server, and by using the professional FLEXCUBE financial application, I have tested the capability of trading features within my project.

• It offers zero-overhead virtualization.
• It's an application-driven software.
• Its networking has helped me combine the power of a neural network with the benefits of virtualization to improve the AI's performance.

The most valuable features of Oracle's technology are the use of Kernel Zones and a ZFS file system, which is the best choice for a shared file system.

Needs NTFS support and VMware compatibility. To install Solaris as a VMware virtual machine, I need to convert the VirtualBox image to a VMware image.

I would love to see improvements in SVM, so file systems could be increased or migrated without downtime to the environment, similar to what ZFS is capable of.

It is more expensive, but very complete and worth enacting.

No, because I've been an Oracle developer for 10 years, and I perfectly grasp the power of Oracle Solutions.

Best choice for professional workers: I personally suggest Oracle Solaris.

I'm happy to test the Oracle Solaris 11.4 Beta.

• Its portability is most important. We can move our database from platform to platform.
• The database itself is fast and reliable and secure.

I think it's more industry an standard and, as a result, we're able to have the right people, the right skill sets, to work on our solution.

Right now, we don't have any difficulties.

Based on my experience I'm very satisfied with the solution. Based on the architecture we have, based on the dependedability, we never have downtime or impact of sorts.

I'm pretty happy with it.

I think Oracle is great in support. We have 24/7 support and anytime that we have any technical hardware or software issue, then we can call and get help.

I think right now everyone talks about the cloud. I think we were falling behind. I would say in, perhaps, not 10 years, maybe less, something like five years, we have to follow the trend.

At that time we had Sybase and we had SQL Server, but then we started moving everything to Oracle.

It was pretty straightforward. It depends on the skill set of the people working with it. I think, for us, we have a group of people that have been working on the operation of the system for a long time.

Regarding selecting a vendor, we are public sector, so we need to have a vendor that has been an industry leader for a long period of time. That's so we can have, in the next decade or two, have reliability.

I think I'd follow the majority of the customers and learn what the vendor has been doing, but not only in the past, what they intend to do in the future as well.

I base my rating of nine out of 10 on the technical solution, and the customer relationship, and the technical support.

The facility to work between database and the equipment. The facility to integrate with other platforms. Our customers use our cloud. They know the importance of Oracle. They have your own datacenter, but slowly, they want to change to the cloud.

Our strategy is to sell the Oracle cloud because it's easy to configure and to increase demand. And most important for us is the security. We have the biggest customers in Colombia, for example, Bank Colombia, Exito Retail, the biggest retailer in Colombia. Davivienda is another big bank in Columbia; Aval Group. All are working with us with Oracle Solaris.

It's slowly come to them. All the customers I named used IBM before. For example, Bank Colombia was on a platform called IBM Power. We sold to them the Solaris platform, the M7 platform, for digital information.

I think Oracle Solaris is stronger than Power in Colombia.

It's good. To me, it's better than other products. For example, Power AIX. I think Solaris better. 

Three years.

It's stable. When we sold the solutions with Solaris, we sold them with premium support. The stability is sometimes is not good. That's the truth. So we sold another component, the TAM (Technical Account Manager) for complete premium support. Oracle TAM helps us to have better support.

It's scalable. For example, when the customer uses Oracle databases, you can migrate to the biggest version easily. This includes migrating from IBM Power to Solaris. I think this is added value for Solaris.

Good. I think it's good.

To me, the perfect vendor provides reliability, that's the big one. And security. That is the other big one.

ZFS.

Compressible file system has been a great benefit for archiving large numbers of small text files.

Software availability.

10+ years.

No, very stable.

No, not really an issue in our environment.

Not available.

No.

Fairly straightforward. Storage seems to be the most complicated part when dealing with physical servers.

This was a long time ago. We considered Linux but wanted the vendor support offered by Sun at the time with both hardware and software, because we didn't have expertise in the area.

Nowadays, I don't think Solaris has a lot of advantages over less expensive options. I do love ZFS and have found it to be very stable. I don't have much experience with it in other distributions but some early attempts with fuse were not stable. That was a while ago, so I bet you can get a stable release of something with ZFS.