Sun has announced a series of updates to its flagship Solaris operating system. Solaris 10 11/06 OS enhances efficiency, safety, and reliability. New security features include Solaris Trusted Extensions, which protects sensitive data and applications using labeled security technology. Secure By Default Networking automatically configures a system to be impervious to network attacks by disabling many unused services, thus reducing the network exposure, while leaving the system fully functional for typical use. In the meantime, HP will be supporting Solaris on its systems.
We’ve deployed 11/06 last year on HP DL380 G5.
Is it news?
HP has kind of supported Solaris for a while now, but I would argue that they don’t do a very good job at it. Some of their blade server that support solaris don’t have working drivers, etc…
Hopefully hp solaris driver support gets better as HP in general makes nice hardware.
What About those Amazing opteron blades and not blades for HP, will those get support too?.
HP could see the writing on the wall…their customers were moving to Sun’s x64 servers running Solaris. By certifying Solaris HP at least gets to keep its hardware sales.
Great news for Sun in that this grows the Solaris ecosystem.
1. Solaris supported SATA
2. Solaris supported Itanium
I see no reason for HPUX.
>>1. Solaris supported SATA <<
From what i recall of checking the OpenSolaris changelogs the most recent builds have included the SATA framework that Sun has been working on. So we will probably see backported to Solaris 10 in one of the next 2-3updates that will be released.
Solaris 10 shipped with the SATA Framework in the 6/06 Release, the chipset support is limited though. Check out the article I wrote for OSNews on 6/06 here:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php/15911/A-Look-at-Solaris-10-606
Or you can check docs.sun.com for what new features are in each release of Solaris 10.
As long as Solaris does not support PowerNow! for the Dual Core Opteron, it simply is no option. And even the PowerNow! solution for the Single Core Opteron is a solution not officially supported by SUN. From the discussions on opensolaris.org I can see that it is difficult to implement and won’t happen for some time to come.
Well, Linux supports it …
Unless you are building clusters or other high density solutions, I really don’t see this as a show stopper. If most data centers are like the one I work in, the problem is let’s cram as much gear as possible into a space and not take into account things like AC until you have a near “meltdown”. And what I just described is more common than you think, the last three places I have worked at (large Government Contracts) have had problems with AC.
And so what if Linux supports it, since Linux cannot support virtualization methods other than Xen, does not support fine grained resource controls (think Oracle licensing here) and infinitely better trace functions, I wouldn’t short myself on these capabilites for this one “feature”. I’ll take a little extra heat for better administration capabilities.
I’ll clarify my last comment in regards to virtualzation, I am speaking of commercial Linux (RedHat and Novell), not other distros which support UML, vserver and other virtualization technologies.
It would be nice if Solaris did support PowerNow! but as far as I can see, it’s not for heat reasons that that companies chose to run Solaris.
Although Linux is caching up, and fast, the pure flexibility of Solaris in terms of high-end computing, coupled with almost infinite fine grained tweaking as well as unbeatable virtaulisation and sandboxing options are, IMO, it’s most attractive selling points.
Now for true power consumption control with Solaris, Spark has got to be your best bet.
Someday we might be able to run Solaris at it’s full potential on commodity hardware. Thank would be nice!
Does Solaris support free VMWare Server? If not, that is a show stopper for us. We are really using VMWare server to its full potential to virtualize older x86-64 hardware – the ones that do not have native hardware support for virtualization. At this point, we are happy with VMWare and have no plans to move to Xen or anything else.
The problem isn’t whether Solaris supports VMware, but whether VMware supports Solaris. My limited testing of VMware Workstation 6 Beta lists Solaris 10 (and 9) as Experimental, I was able to use Solaris 10 11/06 without incident, but I wasn’t using it as a server. I would look at the VMware forums for more information.