Oracle Solaris Reviews

Our primary use case is the storage of logged information from several IoT devices.

We have found the performance features, some partitioning features, compression features, storage features, and the PL/SQL language features to be very valuable.

The administration features are also very useful.

The product is very expensive. 

The Solaris code is open, and the documentation is accessible to all, not only to registered users. Also, the documentation does not support some solutions, and there are no other options.

I've been using this solution for nine years.

Oracle Solaris is stable and reliable.

The initial setup can be complex if you don't have a lot of experience. The deployment can take anywhere from days to months.

It is a very expensive product.

This product is stable, has good documentation, lots of solutions, a big community, and good support. Oracle Solaris is a good product, but it is expensive.

Therefore, I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

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.

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.

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.

I primarily use Solaris for installing software application servers like WebLogic.

Solaris' best feature is its stability.

There is an issue where Solaris doesn't give the correct figures for memory use when checked.

I've been working with Solaris for seven years.

Solaris' stability and reliability is one of its best features.

Solaris is scalable.

Oracle's technical support is good but slow.

I previously worked with Red Hat.

Solaris is highly priced compared to other solutions, but since it's a niche product, this is to be expected.

I would give Solaris a rating of eight out of ten.

The following features are most valuable to me:

• General stability of platform in terms of day to day running minimizes time spent fixing the product
• General stability in terms of update, fix, patch timescale, minimizes required downtime and effort to maintain
• Completeness of solution, feels like Oracle and Solaris are designed to properly work together

Aforementioned stability simplifies ongoing maintenance.

The total cost of ownership of SPARC vs. x86 will always be a consideration.

There is a lack of general availability of training outside of Oracle University.

We are Oracle partners so come from this from both sides of the fence.

Generally skills in Solaris (RISC) are on the decline whereas Linux is still on the rise. You can expect nearly every techie to have x86 windows and or Linux skills but Solaris is a niche skill that is getting harder to recruit for. Previously Solaris was for the enterprise and x86 was commodity however because of the improvement in hardware, x86 is generally a match for RISC in many cases but far cheaper.

If you were starting from scratch, most companies would opt for x86 because it’s cheaper and easier to find skills and training for. You can find any number of training courses for Linux online, classroom, book based, you tube etc etc. Solaris tends to be only supplied by Oracle University at premium rates.

We have used this solution since August 2003.

I did not encounter any issues with deployment. This is a key feature of Solaris.

I did not encounter any issues with stability. This is another key feature of Solaris.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability. This is another key feature of Solaris.

Oracle Support is generally good, although in support requests, there can be a feeling that they are sticking to a script rather than answering the question. My perception is it increases time to resolution. For higher-priority calls, once you get through first-line support, things tend to get better.

We previously used x86 Linux equivalents.

We generally implemented everything with an in-house team.

Using Oracle Enterprise Edition on Solaris was an audit requirement, but I suspect we did not use enough features to make it cost effective otherwise.

Oracle licensing is very complex, so don't make any assumptions that could come back to bite you.

Implementing this product is a no brainer if you are using Oracle databases on SPARC.

It's stable. It scales.

It’s hard to say where I think Solaris can improve. I feel like Solaris is getting more and more into a niche. The problem Solaris has is, it's fighting against open source. Open source is taking more and more of the market. It's for free. Solaris you have to pay for. I think there is a problem. I feel it's a propriety system; not open to be modified by the community.

We’ve been using it a long time; since Solaris 2.6.

Running tests can cause it to crash. I do quality engineering off Oracle Solaris. We make changes to adapt it to our hardware. Of course, then we need to make sure that those changes don't cause problems. When you have your first implementation, you didn't think about things and you might run into problems; the system can crash or stop.

It's scalable. It's stable. You have service for it. If you have a problem, you call and there will be somebody coming and helping you with it.

I can't live without Solaris, because that’s my job.

Solaris has a big customer base, compared to others; at least that's what I feel. I'm mostly focusing on Linux as its competitor. I see that you have servers there; you can scale much higher than on Linux. Linux is more in the field where you do multiple small systems, and I'm at the end of big-use systems.

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.