Phil Stracchino wrote: > Kern Sibbald wrote: > >> As far as I am concerned Sun OpenSource software venture stinks. I think >> with >> all the noise about Oracle buying them, and their blunders in implementation >> of OpenSolaris, MySQL, and VirtualBox, they have little chance of surviving >> in the Open Source software market. Perhaps their high-end hardware >> offerings will fare better. >> > > To be fair, although the OpenSolaris venture was originally set up by > Sun, it is not staffed nor operated by Sun (although Sun has input). I > use Sun Solaris 10 on my main server and I haven't had any problems with > it, but I've heard many reports thaqt code from the OpenSolaris project > is of ... shall we say, dubious stability. OpenSolaris is widely > considered not ready for production.
I've been a Solaris sysadmin for 10 years (been in IT and computers for eons). I've currently got around a dozen Sun Sparc servers of various generations in operation, including the latest T2 based systems. The older systems have all been upgraded to Solaris 9 some years back, and the newer ones are all on Solaris 10. I make heavy use of open source software. I use ZFS extensively, with rolling snapshots. I use multipathing, live upgrade, and a few other things that are recent developments. I haven't used OpenSolaris yet. With that as background, I went to an OpenSolaris users group meeting a while back. One of the presentations was on the development cycle and the relationship between the open source code, OpenSolaris, and Solaris 10. Basically as the development goes along in the open source code, releases of OpenSolaris are spun off fairly frequently. New features appear there fairly quickly. On a less frequent interval, releases of Solaris are spun off. New features don't go in there unless they have gone through longer, more rigorous testing (6 months minimum as a rule). Basically, OpenSolaris is for anyone who wants to use Solaris 10. You get rapid release of interesting new features. In a serious production environment, where stability is critical, you want Solaris 10. The support cycle (from first release to eol with no support) for a Solaris release is about 10 years. Solaris 11 will be appearing sometime in the not too distant future. Solaris 9 is nearing eol. The real focus of Solaris development, from my perspective, has been targeted to server capabilities important to production environments. Just as an example, when I brought online a 12 drive SAS array, it was virtually plug and play with multihomed SAS. Then I used format to see what I had for drive identifiers and then issued one zpool command to set up a raidz2 (comparable to raid6) with one hot spare. After that, a single zfs command can set up a zfs filesystem using that zpool. I can continue setting up as many as I want. It's just way easier to manage and to coordinate use of resources than anything I've ever had access to before. Live upgrade is also easy to use and minimizes downtime for patching and upgrading. There is a forum on linuxquestions.org that deals with Solaris. Obviously a lot less traffic than the rest of the forum, but there are a couple of people there who are really in touch with OpenSolaris and the desktop environment. They routinely answer questions about drivers and such related to the desktop interface that I never have to deal with and that would apply primarily to OpenSolaris. -- --------------- Chris Hoogendyk - O__ ---- Systems Administrator c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center ~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst <hoogen...@bio.umass.edu> --------------- Erdös 4 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Join us December 9, 2009 for the Red Hat Virtual Experience, a free event focused on virtualization and cloud computing. Attend in-depth sessions from your desk. Your couch. Anywhere. http://p.sf.net/sfu/redhat-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
