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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

(Open)Solaris died a few years ago. It has got some great features like Zones and ZFS, and it's still very stable. However, they lost the hearts and minds of almost everyone. I used OpenSolaris for a few months as my desktop. They don't have the package support of Linux, or the large community. Gotta remember to get GNU Make before Sun's Make in PATH, Gnu sed before Sun's, or was the other way around, Perl CPAN modules not compiling... What a waste of time.

As Scott McNealy said: you've gotta get all your wood behind one arrow. That arrow is now Linux.

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Solx86 was always the red-headed stepchild. I don't think Red Hat would have gotten nearly the traction in did if say Oracle on Solaris on Intel/AMD was as well-supported as Oracle on SPARC. Classic case of "innovator's dilemma" - Sun were unwilling to risk the lower end of their SPARC business.

I personally have been involved in projects where we've replaced a million dollars worth of SPARC kit with 50 or 100 grands worth of Intel running Red Hat. It would have been easier, cheaper and quicker to have just swapped the hardware and recompiled... TCO is not (just) in the hardware, it's in the people you need to program and operate it. We had guys with 20 years BSD/SunOS/Solaris experience, developers and sysadmins.

But who'd risk their mission critical systems on an OS the vendor is embarrassed of?

I went to an OpenSolaris users group last year. They were talking about new network features like being able to assign sub-interfaces to different zones. Stuff that VMware ESX had available for years. I was thoroughly unimpressed. The concept of Zones or FreeBSD jails has some appealing aspects; not needing to load multiple kernels in memory, for example, but by this time, Hypervisors such as VMware that deduplicate memory blocks pretty much negate any advantage Zones/Jails once had.

ZFS definitely has some potential though. I hope it will be released under a more liberal license that will allow a direct Linux kernel module as opposed to fuse support.

What kind of ratios are you actually seeing with VMware's deduplicate memory features? I have not seen much on anything I am running, though I admit I don't have them overcommitted very much on RAM (total RAM allocated to all VMs is about the same as physical RAM in the system).

This really depends on what you are running. If you're running an eclectic mix of Windows, Linux, all running different applications and software, you might not get much benefit. Most of our VMs are all running Windows Server 2003 (ugh!) and the exact same terrible web application so we get pretty good savings; about 50%.

I went to an OpenSolaris users group last year. They were talking about new network features like being able to assign sub-interfaces to different zones. Stuff that VMware ESX had available for years.

Zones and ESX are very different beasts, and de-duplication of memory is only part of the issue when you're talking about virtualization of user-space versus hardware virtualization.

But why now? There must have been a good reason for Sun to continue developing their own UNIX variant. I can understand the value-add coming from ZFS, but why having to maintain your own kernel? They could have built their own Linux/BSD distribution with ZFS and any other Sun-branded additions. I guess my question is not "why now" but rather "why not 5 years ago".

I don't really know much about Solaris, just trying to understand the business reasons behind their decision to compete with Linux kernel.

Hm... perhaps because they have thousands of paying corporate customers who started using Solaris before Linux even existed, and they needed to transition them to a newer/expensive hardware without affecting their Solaris-tuned software?

(just thinking out loud, can there be any other reason?)

Even now, Solaris has a far superior VM subsystem and is better performing with multi-thread operations (IMHO).

However my company is going to move away from Solaris to Linux because Oracle is simply not trustworthy (I won't say "IMHO" because it is pretty much a fact).

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