Oracle Solaris Reviews

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 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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.