Is Solaris 11 good enough to be relevant?
By Sean Gallagher | Published about a month ago
On November 9, Oracle officially launched Solaris 11, the latest generation of the operating system it acquired with Sun Microsystems. Oracle is hyping the latest version of Solaris as the "first Cloud OS" and the "first fully virtualized operating system." Regardless of the marketing, the question remains whether this release of Solaris—over a year after it was first previewed—is enough to boost confidence in the future of the operating system and make it a contender beyond Oracle's Sparc platform.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made strong statements about his company's commitment to Solaris when Oracle acquired Sun, and the company's executives have made a point of emphasizing the investment that Oracle has made in developing Solaris for both Sparc and x86 platforms. The company's move to end the OpenSolaris project, the open-source community distribution of the Solaris platform that was launched by Sun in an effort to compete with Linux and to drive community development around emerging Solaris technologies, was explained by Oracle as part of an effort to focus investment on development of Solaris 11 on Intel. Ironically, some of the features that stand out in Solaris 11 are technologies that were kicked off at Sun as part of OpenSolaris.
Solaris 11 improves on the "Solaris Zones" virtualization technology that Sun introduced in Solaris 10, including the"branded zones" that were part of OpenSolaris. Solaris zones are isolated virtual servers running within a single instance of the Solaris operating system. This allows multiple applications to run within the same operating system within isolated containers to guarantee there's no interaction between them, and the failure of one zone has no impact on the other virtual servers running within Solaris. The advantage of zones is that there's no need to run additional copies of the operating system within each virtual server, saving overhead and potentially reducing the number of physical servers required to run a set of workloads in comparison to a hypervisor environment. Sun claims that Solaris Zones have 15 times less overhead than VMware.
Another enhancement introduced in Solaris 11 is its internal network virtualization capabilities, which allow the creation of virtual network switches, load balancers, and other infrastructure within a Solaris server to simplify the configuration of virtual server instances. Those features were initiated as "Project Crossbow" in OpenSolaris 2009.06. And it's these technologies, along with the Solaris ZFS network file system, that Oracle is using to position Solaris 11 as a "cloud OS" and as a competitor to VMware's virtualization environments.
While these technologies predate the Oracle acquisition of Sun, it's clear that Oracle has invested significantly in making them into actual products—products that integrate tightly with everything else Oracle sells. One of the features of Solaris 11 is the Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center, a built-in set of tools that pulls together the management of all of the virtual and physical computing, storage and networking resources in Solaris servers and the application stack running within them.
Oracle clearly has its sights set on the increasingly x86-driven world of cloud infrastructure with Solaris 11. The question is how much impact the OS will have outside Oracle's own vertically-integrated product line. While zones may be more efficient than VMware virtual machines, they're still running Solaris, and that's not exactly a big win for would-be customers who have already invested in applications on some other OS. For a small set of customers who want Solaris security and are willing to pay a premium for a cloud based on it, the new features in Solaris 11 may make that decision a bit more palatable.
http://arstechnica.com/busines...good-enough-to-be-relevant.ars
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