Oracle Solaris Reviews

I can run the database, run a query, run the report, see the whole picture, and analyze the data.

I can see the whole picture and analyze the data. I rely on those a lot. With this database, I feel like I can see the entire database.

I would like it to be faster; sometimes it takes a while, including making a connection. It can be complicated at times, too.

It is very stable. Once in a while, I see IT is involved in a ticket but I don't think it's happening all the time.

I think we used to use Sybase and then we transferred to Oracle. Now, they no longer use the Sybase servers.

I’m not so sure why they switched from Sybase to Oracle, maybe the technology required them to move from Sybase to Oracle. It could have been more stable, more space or something like that.

I like it. If someone asked me for advice, I’d encourage them to use the Oracle.

Backwards compatibility and stability are the most valuable features.

The product is really good in and of itself. It does need more third-party support and applications.

What needs to be improved is the documentation. That's not an issue with the product per se, but the documentation lacks lots of things. It's very difficult to find related things. They are not referenced. When a document speaks about one topic, it almost never refers to related topics. That's a bad thing. Documentation speaks mostly about how to do things; it does not speak about why to do or not to do, when you have options. That's missing. Sun used to have such documentation. With Oracle, I don't see it.

I have been using for over 20 years.

Everything crashes now and then, but Solaris crashes much less often than other operating systems. I am not even talking about Microsoft; I don't know anything about that. Even among other Unix types, Solaris is probably the most stable.

Evaluating scalability depends on what is meant by that term. You cannot go beyond the server, so whatever you have installed in the server is how far you can scale. However, depending on the application, if you can run your application in parallel on a number of machines, then it's scalable. That's not a feature of Solaris, it's a feature of the application.

Technical support is reasonably good, 6/10. Sun support used to be better, more technical. Oracle support for Solaris is probably more persistent, but you have to go through more stages to get to a high technical level. When the problem requires more than one type of support, the delay might be significant.

Probably more than half of the companies where I worked used Solaris, but not all of them. There were a few companies where I worked that were strictly Linux shops; no Solaris. The ones that did use Solaris chose it because it usually scales better in a vertical way. You can get a lot more performance out of a single machine. However, when applications can be scaled horizontally, it's usually cheaper to scale them on x86, which more or less means Linux, although not always.

I don't know if I would recommend this solution. It depends on what and how they want to implement it. I definitely would not advise against it, but a lot depends on, not only on the applications, but also on the skill set that they have. If they have people who know Linux and no one who knows Solaris, go with Linux. I have seen system administrators who don't even know that Unix types other than Linux exist. So, asking them to do something on a different Unix operating system, be it Solaris or HP-UX or a long list of others, that's useless. They know only Linux.

That's probably more of a limiting factor than the application. I can run almost any application on Solaris or on Linux, although not with the same efficiency; that's a different story. Most of the time, Solaris will outperform Linux, but not always. Linux is more flexible, so if I need to make adjustments, they are typically easier to do on Linux.

However, the main thing when advising other companies what to do is: What kind of skill set do you have? What kind of skill set can you have? It's much easier to find people who at least claim to be Linux system administrators than Solaris. You almost have to be a dinosaur.

The most valuable features are its flexibility in virtualization, flexibility in dynamic reallocation of resources and security.

It's an integrated stack for us, so hardware, software, OS and platform all work together, because they all come from Oracle. It easy with the Oracle databases, WebLogic and so on; it's an integrated stack, so we have one vendor to go through.

Live migration of kernel zones would be the biggest improvement for us; the ability to migrate that from one hardware platform to another on the fly without downtime.

It is extremely stable. Of all our OS platforms, it's the most stable we have.

We've scaled it up to the very large systems, the E25Ks in the past. We've rolled in 5000s in the past. We're just now getting T7s, so we're working on those now.

Technical support has been very good. We've had very good success with it, better than we've had with other vendors. They're very fast; good resolution time; good escalation in the hierarchy also.

We had a solution that was going out of support. It was dying off, so we needed to move to a newer platform. Because Oracle already had the database, it made sense to use that platform.

It was a new technology. Some learning curve was involved, but after we understood how to deploy it and how to use, it worked out quite well.

Before choosing this product, we also looked at IBM. That was the other major player. They were cost prohibitive and they didn't seem to have a very good roadmap, as far as their processors and OS.

When I’m choosing a vendor such as Oracle, the important criteria for me are responsiveness, good sales, good after sales, good long-term technical support, and a breadth of technologies; not just siloed on one technology, they've got the entire stack.

When you're doing a TCO analysis, you have to take all factors into consideration, such as migration cost, training cost, back line support cost, professional service cost and to the entire solution. A lot of the vendors just wanted us to pinpoint one area without thinking about the wider-range impact. It makes a big difference.

• ZFS: It is very stable and scalable. It provides excellent security, and cool deduplication, compression, encryption and recovery capabilities.
• DTrace: It is the best for performance analysis and fault analysis.
• Zone containers: The feature is stable and can provide the service with fewer resources.

• Improved transaction processing performance
• Fewer faults (reduction in maintenance fees)

• GUI or menu configuration support
• Management tool visualization

I have more than 15 years of experience with Solaris, including three years of experience with Solaris version 11.

I have never encountered any stability issues; stability is perfect.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. Scalability is powerful and very simple.

I rate technical support in Korea very high.

We used Linux on x86. Linux is very good, but this project is very important from the security, stability and scalability points of view.

Initial setup is very simple and clean.

We evaluated Linux. The issue was cost.

The Solaris Unix platform is very powerful, simple, and scalable. The on-premise environment is optimized, but the cloud environment is not.

If you need a Unix platform, I recommend Oracle Cloud. Oracle Cloud only supports Unix platforms.

It's solid in terms of security; secured systems.

In terms of monitoring, they have quite a bit right now, but it could be a little bit better, especially with all of the virtualized resources.

I have been using the database for 15 years.

It has been stable, pretty much.

Down time has not been because of the OS.

Under load, it has scaled well.

It will definitely meet our needs going into the future.

Technical support is pretty good. Sun used to support it, and now it’s Oracle. We use technical support mostly for the database, and now both the software, the OS, as well as the hardware, are all from the same vendor.

The company has had it for, pretty much, since I joined the company.

The upgrades are pretty straightforward, now-a-days. You can do live upgrades and things like that pretty well.

I definitely recommend it.

When I’m looking at vendors to work with, I definitely look for one with a good reputation of being reliable because that provides a solid foundation for the many components that will run on it. It's definitely not like the sort of software that you can get from some new start-up, which might provide more features and value. The product and the vendor have to be proven.

Reliability, safety, support offered, speed, endurance. Overall, if I’m forced to make an automotive industry comparison, from my perspective Oracle Solaris is the “Volvo” of operating systems.

Reliability – because referenced operating system was always trustful to host assigned applications, in the most desirable way

Safety – penetration test performed against related platforms never get the chance to pick any vulnerabilities. Attempts were logged on system log, daily check scripts pick those and send to monitoring team, investigations was performed to pinpoint the offending host. All the times the host was the one used to perform penetration testing. Other layers of infrastructure security prevented the attackers to rich the Solaris environments, but never heard about proper configured OS like this to get on its knees due to such.

Support Offered – Oracle SPARC platforms come with free support for Solaris operating system, and in contrast with the saying “there is no free lunch”, the support offered is at the highest standards. In some of the rare occasion when high severity incidents ( with root cause proven to be triggered from application side), the customer on organized conference requested a Service request to be opened with Oracle, so the issue to be cornered from both directions. I can say that have nevered encountered a new or known bug on OS side during those experiences.
Speed – Living the hardware and storage capabilities out of the equation, the responsiveness and agility of Solaris operating system is one in the top of my preferences.

Endurance - Years of uptime (except planned downtime related to recommended patch set applying) say it all.

After all of the above, hope that the comparison from automotive industry will not be considered forced at all.

Using Oracle Solaris OS in conjunction with Oracle Solaris Cluster, we are able to offer our organization full OS support so they can achieve the best possible Oracle database performance, security and failover capabilities. This way, their business doesn’t suffer due to unexpected and unplanned IT infrastructure-related downtime.

Since Solaris Volume Manager is the obvious choice for a shared filesystem, I would love to see improvements in SVM so that filesystems can be increased or migrated without downtime for the environment - in a similar way that ZFS is capable of.

Offering more GUI applications might help adoption of Oracle Solaris by professionals coming from the Windows “world”.

Also, adaptation of behavior of commands similar to those from Linux would add familiarity for Linux system administrators aiming to use Oracle Solaris as well. (E.g., in Linux, the ifconfig command with no parameters returns the output for all interfaces. In Oracle Solaris, it causes an error and usage help).

I have used it for 3.5 years.

Encountered issues were back in the time when not enough experience was available for related OS, and some due to bugs that were fixed by patches released.

I will rate technical support as excellent.

IBM AIX was also considered, but x86 platform support from Oracle Solaris (for laboratory, test, DEV and QaS environments) added an advantage that leaned the scales toward Solaris. Proprietary hardware came with an added list of tasks you need to consider and be aware of during live use.

The initial migration project came with lots of organizational challenges, but from a technical perspective, the well-organized “My Oracle Support” and attached community provided the needed answers to go along with a successful pilot environment. From that point on, we needed only to be patient, trigger and organize interactions between various teams, and solve performance issues related to layers other than the OS.

There was an in-house implementation. My advice is to boldly adapt Oracle Solaris OS if the cost fits the organization budget, because this will save lots of future costs related to fixing issues and malfunctions. During implementation, adopters can count on professional support from the vendor using the “My Oracle Support” tool.

ROI, pricing and licensing are variables in an equation that changes from one case to the other. In my case, I wasn’t involved in the accounting part of this; therefore, I cannot provide more details.

Before adopting Oracle Solaris, extensive pre-testing is needed in order to gain the necessary experience. Ideally, certification on Oracle Solaris for related IT team members is desirable.

In Solaris 11, Network Virtualization, LDOMs, Zones, ZFS, and Live Upgrade are the most valuable features to me. In Solaris 10, the most valuable features are the Live Upgrade, ZFS, Zones, and SVC Feature.

It helps a lot in data center consolidation, P2V, and with LDOM live migration. It reduces required overall downtime, and is highly scalable, especially with T5 architecture.

I have noticed very frequent HBA and NIC card failure in T5-1B or T4-1B blade servers. More stability is required. I have experience multiple instances where QUAD HBA+NIC Port, for T4-1B, T5-1B was failed. And we had some downtime, as replacing HBA card, potentially needs server to be powered-off. Though this was noticed in case of Blade servers only, not for T5-8 or T5-2 or T4-2 etc.

We have been using Solaris 11 for 3-4 years, and Solaris 10 for 10 years.

I didn’t encounter any issues with deployment.

I didn’t encounter any issues with scalability.

I rate technical support at 9.

I have had the opportunity to work with various other UNIX as well as Linux operating systems, but among all of them, I found Solaris to be a very stable operating system. Now with the evolution of LDOMs, ZFS and zones, it’s providing a perfect platform for virtualization solutions.

To me, installation doesn’t seem complex, but at the same time comprehensive understanding of technology is required.

We performed implementation ourselves, except some time when we requested Oracle professional services request.

I recommend Oracle solutions such as T5 Super-Cluster, T5-8 and the Oracle Solaris 11 operating system, as they are highly scalable and fault-tolerant systems.

I rate Solaris 10 a 7.

Built-in virtualisation (Zones / LDOMS), ZFS, SMF, and FMA.

By standardising the infrastructure, we were able to reduce the number of physical hosts. We got rid of file system corruption (thanks to ZFS). Enlarging the file system was as easy as eating the candy.

The product itself is great. I would like to see whether other companies start developing for Solaris.

I have been using Solaris 11 for four years and Sun Cluster 4.1 for three years.

I’ve never had a problem with deployment (well-configured Jumpstart and AI). We have noted almost no hardware failures. Due to Solaris Cluster 4.1’s Live Migration future, we have achieved 99.9999% service uptime.

The level of customer service varies depending on the geo zone, but mostly Oracle support is very good and quick with providing the resolution for problems.

Because we have designed our boxes in a very complex way, the setup took some time and it’s not a straightforward (click, click) setup. It requires skills to create a well-functioning environment. That is why people who have never worked with Solaris or had “one date” with it should never set up any Solaris box.

We implemented the product in-house. I recommend reading the documentation and not assuming that if you know Linux, you know Solaris.

Concurrently we have used HP blades with VMware for our Linux environment. Due to fact that not all of the applications were running on Solaris, it has cost us much more effort to make those three work together. It is more time consuming to deploy VM on that environment than on Solaris.

If you have never done it or you do not have a sufficient amount of experience, hire an external consultant or an Oracle consultant to do the job.