Oracle Solaris Reviews

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.

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.

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.

We use Oracle Solaris to develop and support our VDCF (Virtual Datacenter Cloud Framework) management software. Several virtual machines (LDoms and Zones) are used on SPARC and x86 Servers.

We are able to deploy new environments very quickly and securely. Using the virtualization features, we can migrate the environments very flexibly between our servers.

Solaris includes two virtualization solutions: LDoms for SPARC and Solaris Zones. Both solutions can be combined to create private clouds. Solaris Zones is ideal to separate applications and to migrate from older to current hardware. LDoms is very efficient because it uses the hardware hypervisor of the SPARC servers.
Both technologies increase Security, because they separate the applications from each other. Using the Security Compliance Framework we are sure the systems are setup properly

Patching without downtime would be nice.

Update 08/2021: Live Paching of Kernel is now available. We applied IDRs successfully on several servers.

More than 11 years now.

We had no issues with the stability.

Solaris is very robust and scalable. No issues so far scaling it.

Oracle offers a good online support portal called "My Oracle Support", which includes a big knowledge base. Because Oracle is a very large organization, it sometimes takes a bit too much time for support requests to reach the right support engineer.

Neutral

Used Solaris 10 before, but Solaris 11 is much easier and faster with patching.
Based on BootEnvironments and ZFS Solaris 11 always offers a failback.

The initial setup is straightforward. Oracle has in-depth admin manuals. To speed up deployments, we implemented our own deployment and management framework VDCF.

We implemented it with our in-house team based on Oracle's best practices documents. With virtualization, we recommend to first define a standard on how to deploy and then to deploy using that standard, avoiding any variation. There are so many options, but our favorite is the fully-virtualized LDom with applications installed into Solaris Zones.

When buying a server from Oracle, all the software is included -- OS, virtualization and patches. There are no hidden costs. We like the long life cycle of Solaris and the SPARC servers. There's no need to replace the hardware every two to three years, and we have a life cycle of five years and more.

Use deployment tools for automation and avoid doing everything manually. Deployment tools help to avoid errors and create a standardized environment.

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.

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.