Oracle Solaris Reviews

The following are the most valuable features to me:

• Solaris zones: Allows for better server utilization. Drives number of physical servers down. Very lean virtualization technology which I generally prefer to others.
• Live upgrade: In Solaris 10, it allowed us to decrease downtime.
• ZFS: Was and is still the best logical volume manager / file system in my opinion. There is still nothing like it production-ready in the Linux world. Favorite features:
  
  • dedup
  • snapshots
  • checksums and self healing

Dtrace is also pretty useful. However, now Oracle Linux has it and also in RedHat Linux, there is “systemtap” which closely mimics dtrace.

It’s pretty much irrelevant right now as we switched to RedHat several years ago. At least in the telecom solutions I work with.

I would probably like to see it open sourced once again, as was situation with Open Solaris.

Right now, I see less and less organizations using Solaris and, at least from my point of view, there is not much active development around it.

I used this solution for eight years.

Deployment was never an issue.

However, Solaris 10 Jump Start and Solaris 11 AI were somewhat harder to use than the analogue PXE boot + kickstart technology used in RedHat.

Stability was never an issue either.

The last time I had to deal with tech support was probably five years ago.

I find that Solaris had a more difficult learning curve compared to Linux. Partly because there was a much wider Linux community, which is still true today.

I wouldn’t call it complex, but definitely when I started to work with Solaris in 2003, I found a few surprises. At that time, I had Linux administration experience.

We implemented it in-house.

As I've mentioned, it’s hard for me to make any recommendations as I have been working with RedHat for a long time now.

Robust kernel: The heart of an OS, i.e., it’s the base/foundation of any operating system. If we have a robust kernel, the chance of getting server panic, etc., is reduced to almost negligible levels and that’s true with Solaris and even with IBM AIX. The bug levels and vulnerabilities to hit such robust kernels are very low.

Patch/package management: Change is a part of IT, with the increased technologies day by day, new software is evolving every day. If the way to install, manage, upgrade, configure them is not easy, then instead of using the software for growth, techies will be killing their time fixing them. With Solaris, this system is very strong. Regular security fixes, vulnerability fixes, recommended patches for new kernel and for new features is in Oracle’s release management process, which is very beneficial for customers to stay updated and fix old bugs.

Visibility at the OS level (nothing hidden): In case of issues, the logging system for Solaris is outstanding. With logs, we can debug the issues to a higher degree by ourselves. In case any changes to kernels are required, Oracle is always there to fix them via patches/pkgs, which is again valued added for any customer.

Compatibility with third-party DB's and applications: The compatibility to install databases and application on top of Solaris is just amazing, we hardly see any issues during installation/upgrade, except third-party driver issues. So overall, it’s an amazing OS to work with.

It integrates with different applications with complete stability.

I think Oracle should also promote x86 architecture for Solaris, so that the same can be used in ESX and in cloud environments with an x86 variant. It would be a bonus for Oracle.

SPARC hardware is costly. Most businesses want to run their infrastructure environments - especially non-production environments - on x86 hardware, where customers can run heterogeneous OS platforms (Linux, Solaris and/or AIX). However, this is not possible with AIX at all (especially with Solaris). So, if Oracle improved x86 support in Solaris, it could promote Solaris x86 as having the same stability and reliability levels as Solaris SPARC servers. This would provide customers a reason to move their servers - which are currently migrating to Linux servers – to Solaris x86. And I am sure this will boost Solaris even further. I am well aware that Oracle is promoting Oracle Linux for the same reasons, but I think the same can be done in a better way for the existing Solaris OS.

I have been using it since 2007 until now.

We always perform POCs first and try to do all possible testing in that phase. As such, we have not encountered any major deployment issues.

It actually depends on the application version, and compatibility also. Sometimes, after a kernel patch, we might encounter some issues, but that’s just because of poor planning and poor documentation.

For standalone systems, scalability’s always a challenge, but improved T-series and M-series have good options. However, Oracle still lags behind in this area, compared to ESX and IBM (LPARs), to a great extent.

Sun Microsystems customer service was superb!!! (My first love sunsolve.sun.com.) When Oracle initially took over, their customer service was just pathetic, but it slowly improved. It’s always hard to maintain the same standards and I can understand it’s tough in the initial phases. I would say, from my experience, there is still room for improvement in this area.

Technical support is good, as it’s divided into different levels. Sometimes, it takes time before L1 escalates to L2/L3 and that sometimes is frustrating (sometimes :-) ).

Before moving to engineering, I worked as admin / implementation team in a heterogeneous environment. So this solution completely depends upon cost and the client’s requirements.

Migration is always a challenging step, if you want everything to be the same as it is running on an existing environment. AIX to Solaris or Linux to Solaris or vice versa is always a job to be performed with extra precaution, as you are going to play with your data.

We implemented it ourselves and did the hardware replacements via a global vendor. It’s good.

ROI is good. I am sure Solaris has devoted everything to it. For an OS to survive a long time, Oracle has to maintain Solaris like a baby, as Sun Microsystems did until 2010.

Since taken over by Oracle, there has been an increase in the software cost (earlier patch/packages were free with SunSsolve), but that’s business and I think it’s okay.

Today, if you ask me for low-cost solutions, I have open-source Linux versions and for stable releases, we have RedHat and IBM AIX.

It’s a very good product to use. You are going to love this OS.

I still love Solaris; for me, it’s always been the best.

In, Oracle Solaris 11, the most valuable features to me are ZFS, Automated Installer, and Kernel Zones. In Solaris 10, they are ZFS, SMF, Live Upgrade, Zones, and JumpStart.

I would like to see improvements in user adaptability, the poor UI, and in the packaging of the applications. Solaris should look like Linux and the end user should not be afraid of using it. It's way different than linux.

It should have POSIX compatibility with Linux.

We have been used Oracle Solaris 11 for four years, and Solaris 10 for eight years.

There is limited deployment support outside of the documentation on the Oracle site, which is a problem when it comes to configuring, deploying and support for Solaris. Outside of docs.oracle.com, there’s very little knowledge base available, which is a big problem for Solaris.

For Oracle Solaris 11, I rate customer service and technical support a 7/10. For Solaris 10, 6/10.

Solaris 11 had its challenges, being a new OS & again with the limited knowledge outside of the subscription world and its adaptability rate.

Solaris 10 was not too complex to deploy.

If I had a chance, I would implement it on my own, as long as Oracle’s subscription is affordable.

It is NOT affordable compared to Linux. Oracle’s licensing policy is horrible.

Unfortunately, we are moving away from Oracle Solaris & completely into Linux now. We have replaced a whole lot of Solaris with RHEL. That's what’s happening more in IT. Oracle’s poor strategy to lift the Solaris OS and tight licensing policy is killing Solaris.

Easy-to-find self-help in Linux through different sources increases its user adaptability rate & popularity. If Solaris is even going to survive, they need to change the marketing & licensing strategy.

Solaris 11 OS is as good as Linux. In fact, some of their features are way more advanced than Linux. But you need to self-learn, get to the comfort level of using it and push others to do so, especially the platform consumers.

Zones and resource allocation through capping and project is my favourite feature.

Lately, I have been using ZFS and I absolutely love it, but I didn't get much of a chance to explore it fully in a production environment.

This product performed wonderfully with my banking client, where I participated in implementation of virtualization through Solaris zones and then capping CPUs. We integrated zones with VCS clusters. It provided unmatchable stability, high availability, scalability and the best tunable performance.

We used it on M series, X series or the latest T series. It gave great reliable performance on all of the hardware.

I believe it's a great product and its latest versions are also really good. However, I believe Oracle is not utilising its full potential by restricting it best performance with Oracle hardware. Even though it can be run on SPARC, as well as Intel hardware, the problem lies with the way Oracle chooses to promote it. They are always saying that it performs best with Oracle hardware. They should understand current demand for open source and publish white papers for its performance on Intel hardware. And they must change their stratergy with Dell, HP and other blade server manufacturers and enable them to use Solaris and promote Solaris.

Also, they should promote Oracle Solaris with open source tools like HANA, Hadoop, Puppet, Chef, and Ansible. Meanwhile, they can continue to develop and promote their in-house competitive products as well.

To summarise, I feel the main issue lies with their promotion and sales strategies, and also their relations with competing hardware vendors and database/application vendors.

I have used Solaris for more than 8 years, almost all of my career, with all of my clients.

I have done many deployments, migrations and so on with Solaris or to Solaris, and I never faced a problem where I would have received a response from Oracle/Sun support that it was not possible. The product and its features work almost exactly as promised and the documentation available for the product.

Yes, I have seen bugs like zoneadmd hanging, or a zone getting stuck in a shutting down state, but they usually don't happen during deployments or planned activities.

Experience with Sun support was absolutely fantastic, but it deteriorated a little when Oracle support took over.

Most of the environments used Solaris, and we upgraded from Solaris 8/9 to Solaris 10.

In my experience, we mostly moved up from older hardware running Solaris 8 to Solaris 10 on new hardware. Complexities came in the form of an upgraded version of Veritas Cluster and volume manager or storage migration. Solaris itself didn't create any issues at OS level.

We mostly did implementation through in-house teams.

The most important thing is to have a sufficient downtime window and application or database support teams to be available to verify immediately.

I don't have much of an idea about pricing, but it should be decoupled from SPARC architecture.

Even though nowadays, I am using RedHat Linux, in my environment, I miss Solaris a lot.

Trust Solaris. It is still better than Linux in many ways.

Solaris' most valuable features to me are its stability, scalability, dependability, RAS, HA, I know there are loads more TLA’s that can be used, and of course it’s grown into all the new cloud features, also, to be ready for the next generation.

For Oracle, it’s Oracle; is there any better database? I’m biased. It can be used on the smallest device running a simple meta data store to the biggest, hard-hitting, critical system.

I just think the maturity of Solaris, the base core has been proven, and it is evident in these Enterprise level/required features. People don't look at Solaris and ask is it production ready, it is probably one of the first options written down when people need to look at a Unix OS for big critical solutions because of the core features. Other features thats always been there is of course Security also, and now being expanded with all the Cloud ready features.

I’m working less and less with the OS it seems. Where I used to think, "I’d love them to improve this," I’ve heard that's exactly what they’ve done. Even the newest Oracle Mini Cluster only has a visual interface for deployment and management.

The OS always needed and still does need more of a visual interface. Not to take anything away from the command line - I love that - but for basic mass user community acceptance, there is a large Windows, under-30 user base that doesn’t know how to think when they don’t have a mouse to do things with.

I've been using Solaris as an OS to host mostly Oracle primarily since 1998. I first ran it on a little Sun Classic 50. That would have been Oracle 7.3.2. Next machine up was a Sun Sparc E450. I called it the coffee table, as it was right next to my desk. I had 2 of them, one running an Oracle Database, the other Running Dynamo Application Server + Apache Web server. Eventually I lost my coffee tables to the server room when the project went live.

With Solaris and Oracle, never. If you’ve done your homework and you're prepared and know what you want to accomplish and how to get it done, then all goes perfectly, but then that's life: Prepare and things work; don’t and you have a hard time ahead trying to hammer it into shape/direction.

You DO need to know how to work with support, they do have all the information, and the means to figure out a problem, but like any support division, not always the easiest to engage with.

I use Linux a lot, and, well before Oracle, I used to work on Sybase.

I’ve never done anything straightforward. I tend to specialise in the complex deployments, putting them together in such a way that they actually become simple to manage with the minimal of skills.

I use to be with a platinum partner, then I worked for the vendor, and now I'm with a partner again, so I’ve done both sides of the fence. The most important part of any solution is KNOW your problem first, then look at the proposed solution and it’s components and the features, and identify which features are to be used to solve which part of the problem, and try and follow KISS. ;)

Consolidate where it makes sense. At times, simply trying to increase ROI can increase complexity, which pushes up operational complexity and associated costs/risks, which actually hurts cost of ownership and has a silent impact on the ROI, as it might not get adopted as eagerly as hoped.

Again, with any project, know the problem; know your available options. There might be multiple options in different products available from the same vendor. Decide which ones together will work best for you, and it will at times definitely not be the one that is being proposed by sales. Don’t be afraid to push the vendor to the edge. At times, the best options/solution might cost you some red eyes/sleepless nights, but they also long-term put you ahead of the curve of your competitors.

Too many features to count, the built in, low overhead integration is a huge plus, as is the ease of patching, the ability to use DTRACE to real time troubleshoot issues, the integrated security and most of all the performance.

The compliance command simplifies how complex security audits are performed, saving time. Also the patching is better than Linux, just as easy to patch, but with the integrated snapshots easier to back out of a patch. This saves hours of patch prep each time you patch a server. Enabling admin/server rations exceeded any linux or windows solution.

One cool feature with Oracle Linux, is the ability to patch without a reboot. Getting this working on Solaris would rock! With the new M7/S7 chips, better DTRACE visibility into the hardware acceleration offloading would be nice. Difficult to explain a server that is 90% idle but doing the workload of 4 Intel servers.

I have been using Solaris since the early 90s.

No major issues, the biggest challenge is retraining older Solaris 10 admins. The Linux admin shave no issues switching over.

No issues, recovery from patching is simple and I have yet to have a Solaris 11 system core dump. Troubleshooting RCA on a core dump is very easy though.

No issues scaling this, you can scale to over 1024 cores using the Fujitsu M10-s servers. I don;t think any Intel system can do that.

Customer service is what you would expect from a large multi-national company... but I rarely call support. The online tools are great.

The online tools are great, but the phone folks could use a little more training. But I rarely call them, as the online tools work %90 of the time.

I have used Linux, Windows, AIX and more. With Solaris 10, I stopped using AIX for any solutions, and focus on Solaris for larger systems, Linux for smaller systems and Windows when I need Microsoft. The new S7 is having me take a second look at using Solaris for the smaller systems as well.

Install is simple, the OS is preinstalled on the servers. Installing from ISO is simple,and Oracle also has several VMs you can download and deploy.

We use in-house staff most of the time. As I said, Linux admins can easily transition over. Patching is a great example.. linux is "yum update" and Solaris 11 is "pkg update"

The ROI is higher than Windows, due to the ease of patching and troubleshooting issues with DTRACE. Running down issues is wickedly fast, as you can use dtrace while the problem is happening.

Licensing is a core feature, as you can use zones and LDOMs to reduce the number of core you need to license Oracle product for. This is a huge saving for anyone using Oracle Database of Middleware.

Yes, we look at all options, and pick the OS that is the best match for the application. Solaris is more often or not the choice.

Have an open mind when looking at a new OS. Many things have changed in the last five years, you can not compare Solaris 11 to older versions.

Fantastic features are contained in Solaris, such as Zones and LDOM, which have given solutions to companies for which I have provided consulting services. By using Solaris Zones, I have consolidated big environments into just a few hosts. Additionally, by using the built-in resource manager feature from Solaris, it's possible to control and set up limits for CPU and memory consumption. Finally, installing packages and patches into a virtualized system are very simple tasks.

Solaris has made the administration simpler, easy and intuitive. Its innumerable security and performance features provide conviction to companies that they're moving forward in the right direction.

During my many years of use, I've suffered with small problems while implementing the advanced features of Solaris. They were always, however, resolved by referring to the old and legendary Sun Solve and, today, to the excellent Oracle documentation website (http://docs.oracle.com).

I've worked with it for exactly 16 years since version 5.7 (Solaris 7). I've had the opportunity to follow dozens of features being implemented during this long period of time. Better yet, I have a good perspective about next new features which will be introduced in the near future, so I am sure Solaris will continue alive and strong for many years.

I've had the small problems in the Areas for Improvement section, but other than that, I haven't had issues with deployment.

I've absolutely never had any issues with stability. Solaris is a very solid and stable operating system, and its release schedule ensures that all potential stability problems are resolved as soon as possible. Additionally, the Solaris kernel is one of most interesting and featured kernels that I have ever seen because almost everything is made and implemented by taking into account security and stability.

One of the more remarkable advantages of Solaris is the fact that it scales almost linearly. New SPARC processors introduce more cores and Solaris' performance responds proportionally. In particular, I have observed a huge performance gain while processing mathematical applications.

They're straightforward. Honestly, I don't have constant contact with customer services, but the few contacts that I have had were fair enough. Oracle professionals always had a suitable behavior and an appropriate attention to problems.

When my clients needed technical support, the level of customer service was excellent because most field engineers are ready to solve any problem almost instantly.

When critical problems come up and the first level of engineers is not able to solve the issue, the problems are forwarded to more experienced specialist and it is enough to solve the issue quickly.

A long time ago, an open Linux distribution was the main option for running most hosts, but raw performance and security problems forced us to migrate most critical systems to Solaris.

The initial setup was not complex in any way. All Solaris implementations are extremely straightforward, easy to install, and well documented. Most Solaris commands are kept from older versions, which is a big advantage because we can reuse past knowledge.

I always implement solutions by myself because have enough knowledge about Oracle solutions. Nonetheless, most vendors team that I could work together have an appropriate knowledge about all Oracle products.

The ROI of my customers have been very high. As Oracle Solaris provides a total integration with the remaining Oracle portfolio, the necessary time to implement any Oracle solution is very short. Furthermore, as Oracle Solaris is very solid and stable, usually the downtime is insignificant and all investment is recovered by keeping their business working well.

Before thinking about pricing and licensing, we should try to understand whether the return of investment will be enough and fair. For example, I have provided technical consulting services for several companies that, at first, chose another operating system, but after some time, they implemented Oracle Solaris because they understood the importance of an operating system which provides security, performance, and total integration.

No, I didn't. Usually, I try to understand the customer's environment before making any choice, but most of the time I can use Oracle Solaris and part of its features as the more suitable solution.

Before implementing Oracle Solaris, my best recommendation would be to know all its available features for making the right choices. I have seen several implemented solutions which are working, but they could have implemented better techniques and methods if more appropriate features had been chosen for the specific project.

We use the product to manage databases.

The product's most valuable feature is partitioning resources and optimizing hardware utilization effectively.

They could also enable Oracle OEM for x86 architecture as well. It is currently applied only to risk processors. It could help reduce costs associated with x86 environments compared to risk environments.

We have been using Oracle Solaris for three years.

I rate the platform's stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the platform's scalability a ten out of ten. It is suitable for medium-scale businesses.

The initial setup process is difficult and needs technical skills. It takes a few days to complete the implementation of all the parameters.

It is an expensive product. I rate the pricing a ten out of ten.

I rate Oracle Solaris a ten out of ten.