Oracle Solaris Reviews

We primarily use Oracle Solaris for its virtualization capabilities to host critical applications.

The platform has valuable stability.

More monitoring tools could be included in the product.

We have been using Oracle Solaris for ten years. At present, we use the latest version.

There have been specific instances while booting the system where we had to roll back the product to a previous version due to certain risks or issues. I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

We manage around six customers for Oracle Solaris. It is a scalable product.

A lot of resolutions are already available in the product's knowledge base. Thus, we don't have to contact the support team frequently.

Oracle Solaris is pre-installed in our environment. Thus, it is simple to customize, and it takes a few hours to complete. One executive is required to work on the deployment and maintenance.

The product is inexpensive.

I rate Oracle Solaris a nine out of ten. I advise others to ensure they can support the setup for the foreseeable future.

I find it most valuable that it is based on Linux. It is very user-friendly.

I would like to see a graphical user interface (GUI) improved.

Moreover, there is room for improvement in documentation. 

I have been working with this solution for three years now. 

It is a stable solution. 

It is a scalable solution. I recommend it for bigger companies. We have been selling it to some major telecom sites.

The technical support is very responsive and user-friendly. I do not see any problem with their current speed of response.

Positive

I worked with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a wider variety of resources, so I would recommend it more often.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is more secure and better documented. So Oracle could learn from them when it comes to security and documentation.

I recommend it to my customers. Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We use the product as an operating system for web and database servers.

Oracle Solaris provides an ease of use. This aspect is very important for our organization.

The product has a seamless upgrade feature to set the ZFS file system.

We have been using Oracle Solaris for 20 years.

I rate the product’s stability a ten out of ten.

We have 70 Oracle Solaris users in our organization. It is easy to scale as we can use multiple PCs connected through one CPU. We use the product daily.

The technical support services are fine. However, the team could be more knowledgeable.

We have used Windows and several versions of Linux before.

The initial setup is easy. It takes around 30 minutes to an hour to install it on a new computer. It requires one admin executive to work on the process.

The implementation can be done in-house.

I rate Oracle Solaris a ten out of ten.

The solution can be used to run some applications on your PC. 

Oracle Solaris's operating system is good. 

The scalability of the solution can be improved. 

I have been using Oracle Solaris for ten years. 

Oracle Solaris is highly stable. I rate the stability a ten out of ten. 

The solution is scalable. Three people are using the solution at present. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten. 

The technical support is helpful and the response time depends on the severity of the problem. 

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment takes three hours time.

The deployment can be done in-house. 

The solution is free to use. 

I recommend using this solution. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

The primary use case of this solution is for the installation of the Oracle Database and further monitoring and managing.

The most valuable feature is the ease of setup.

The solution is pricey and can be improved by lowering the cost.

I have been using the solution for almost three years.

The solution is stable as long as you apply the patches and upgrades as recommended by the vendors.

The solution is scalable.

The technical support is on point and is always helpful.

Positive

Previously to using this solution I used Linux and Microsoft.

The initial setup was straightforward with the help of Oracle documentation and took one day.

The implementation was completed with the help of a vendor.

The solution is expensive and is based on an annual fee.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

Unlike most Oracle products which are complex to set up this solution can be deployed with the help of the Oracle documentation for a UAT or IST integration case environment purpose.

There are over 60 people using the solution in our organization.

If cost is not an issue I recommend the solution.

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 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.

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.