Oracle Solaris Reviews

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.

Robust kernel: The heart of an OS, i.e., it’s the base/foundation of any operating system. If we have a robust kernel, the chance of getting server panic, etc., is reduced to almost negligible levels and that’s true with Solaris and even with IBM AIX. The bug levels and vulnerabilities to hit such robust kernels are very low.

Patch/package management: Change is a part of IT, with the increased technologies day by day, new software is evolving every day. If the way to install, manage, upgrade, configure them is not easy, then instead of using the software for growth, techies will be killing their time fixing them. With Solaris, this system is very strong. Regular security fixes, vulnerability fixes, recommended patches for new kernel and for new features is in Oracle’s release management process, which is very beneficial for customers to stay updated and fix old bugs.

Visibility at the OS level (nothing hidden): In case of issues, the logging system for Solaris is outstanding. With logs, we can debug the issues to a higher degree by ourselves. In case any changes to kernels are required, Oracle is always there to fix them via patches/pkgs, which is again valued added for any customer.

Compatibility with third-party DB's and applications: The compatibility to install databases and application on top of Solaris is just amazing, we hardly see any issues during installation/upgrade, except third-party driver issues. So overall, it’s an amazing OS to work with.

It integrates with different applications with complete stability.

I think Oracle should also promote x86 architecture for Solaris, so that the same can be used in ESX and in cloud environments with an x86 variant. It would be a bonus for Oracle.

SPARC hardware is costly. Most businesses want to run their infrastructure environments - especially non-production environments - on x86 hardware, where customers can run heterogeneous OS platforms (Linux, Solaris and/or AIX). However, this is not possible with AIX at all (especially with Solaris). So, if Oracle improved x86 support in Solaris, it could promote Solaris x86 as having the same stability and reliability levels as Solaris SPARC servers. This would provide customers a reason to move their servers - which are currently migrating to Linux servers – to Solaris x86. And I am sure this will boost Solaris even further. I am well aware that Oracle is promoting Oracle Linux for the same reasons, but I think the same can be done in a better way for the existing Solaris OS.

I have been using it since 2007 until now.

We always perform POCs first and try to do all possible testing in that phase. As such, we have not encountered any major deployment issues.

It actually depends on the application version, and compatibility also. Sometimes, after a kernel patch, we might encounter some issues, but that’s just because of poor planning and poor documentation.

For standalone systems, scalability’s always a challenge, but improved T-series and M-series have good options. However, Oracle still lags behind in this area, compared to ESX and IBM (LPARs), to a great extent.

Sun Microsystems customer service was superb!!! (My first love sunsolve.sun.com.) When Oracle initially took over, their customer service was just pathetic, but it slowly improved. It’s always hard to maintain the same standards and I can understand it’s tough in the initial phases. I would say, from my experience, there is still room for improvement in this area.

Technical support is good, as it’s divided into different levels. Sometimes, it takes time before L1 escalates to L2/L3 and that sometimes is frustrating (sometimes :-) ).

Before moving to engineering, I worked as admin / implementation team in a heterogeneous environment. So this solution completely depends upon cost and the client’s requirements.

Migration is always a challenging step, if you want everything to be the same as it is running on an existing environment. AIX to Solaris or Linux to Solaris or vice versa is always a job to be performed with extra precaution, as you are going to play with your data.

We implemented it ourselves and did the hardware replacements via a global vendor. It’s good.

ROI is good. I am sure Solaris has devoted everything to it. For an OS to survive a long time, Oracle has to maintain Solaris like a baby, as Sun Microsystems did until 2010.

Since taken over by Oracle, there has been an increase in the software cost (earlier patch/packages were free with SunSsolve), but that’s business and I think it’s okay.

Today, if you ask me for low-cost solutions, I have open-source Linux versions and for stable releases, we have RedHat and IBM AIX.

It’s a very good product to use. You are going to love this OS.

I still love Solaris; for me, it’s always been the best.

• Its portability is most important. We can move our database from platform to platform.
• The database itself is fast and reliable and secure.

I think it's more industry an standard and, as a result, we're able to have the right people, the right skill sets, to work on our solution.

Right now, we don't have any difficulties.

Based on my experience I'm very satisfied with the solution. Based on the architecture we have, based on the dependedability, we never have downtime or impact of sorts.

I'm pretty happy with it.

I think Oracle is great in support. We have 24/7 support and anytime that we have any technical hardware or software issue, then we can call and get help.

I think right now everyone talks about the cloud. I think we were falling behind. I would say in, perhaps, not 10 years, maybe less, something like five years, we have to follow the trend.

At that time we had Sybase and we had SQL Server, but then we started moving everything to Oracle.

It was pretty straightforward. It depends on the skill set of the people working with it. I think, for us, we have a group of people that have been working on the operation of the system for a long time.

Regarding selecting a vendor, we are public sector, so we need to have a vendor that has been an industry leader for a long period of time. That's so we can have, in the next decade or two, have reliability.

I think I'd follow the majority of the customers and learn what the vendor has been doing, but not only in the past, what they intend to do in the future as well.

I base my rating of nine out of 10 on the technical solution, and the customer relationship, and the technical support.

The facility to work between database and the equipment. The facility to integrate with other platforms. Our customers use our cloud. They know the importance of Oracle. They have your own datacenter, but slowly, they want to change to the cloud.

Our strategy is to sell the Oracle cloud because it's easy to configure and to increase demand. And most important for us is the security. We have the biggest customers in Colombia, for example, Bank Colombia, Exito Retail, the biggest retailer in Colombia. Davivienda is another big bank in Columbia; Aval Group. All are working with us with Oracle Solaris.

It's slowly come to them. All the customers I named used IBM before. For example, Bank Colombia was on a platform called IBM Power. We sold to them the Solaris platform, the M7 platform, for digital information.

I think Oracle Solaris is stronger than Power in Colombia.

It's good. To me, it's better than other products. For example, Power AIX. I think Solaris better. 

Three years.

It's stable. When we sold the solutions with Solaris, we sold them with premium support. The stability is sometimes is not good. That's the truth. So we sold another component, the TAM (Technical Account Manager) for complete premium support. Oracle TAM helps us to have better support.

It's scalable. For example, when the customer uses Oracle databases, you can migrate to the biggest version easily. This includes migrating from IBM Power to Solaris. I think this is added value for Solaris.

Good. I think it's good.

To me, the perfect vendor provides reliability, that's the big one. And security. That is the other big one.

I'm a distributor who provides Oracle Solaris virtualization solutions to about 100 customers. I'm with the biggest distributor of Sun Microsystems. 

It's stable.

Solaris is not easy to use. It needs better GUI, UI, and configuration tools.

I've been using Oracle Solaris for 16 years.

Solaris is scalable because they have their own file system, like CFS.

Oracle support is getting better.

Installation is complex and it takes up to two days. To install and configure Solaris to meet the average customer's requirements takes two or three engineers.

Licensing for Solaris is normally on a yearly basis.

I would rate Solaris eight out of 10.

ZFS.

Compressible file system has been a great benefit for archiving large numbers of small text files.

Software availability.

10+ years.

No, very stable.

No, not really an issue in our environment.

Not available.

No.

Fairly straightforward. Storage seems to be the most complicated part when dealing with physical servers.

This was a long time ago. We considered Linux but wanted the vendor support offered by Sun at the time with both hardware and software, because we didn't have expertise in the area.

Nowadays, I don't think Solaris has a lot of advantages over less expensive options. I do love ZFS and have found it to be very stable. I don't have much experience with it in other distributions but some early attempts with fuse were not stable. That was a while ago, so I bet you can get a stable release of something with ZFS.

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.