TOUG folks meet Solaris 10 :)
I am very happy that even if we (Sun) were not able to make a formal presentation at the Toronto Oracle Users group yesterday, there were a lot of people who stopped by our booth. The number of people, the kinds of questions asked, the comments given, and the lenghts of conversations we had -- all of these gives me a very good feeling about how Sun and Solaris are being viewed these days.
So... as promised, here are the initial notes and links to the major points we talked about yesterday, together with some brief comments:
- Solaris is Open source. FAQ for the CDDL license is here.
- While it is true that Solaris traditionally ran on SPARC, it also now runs on x86 (32-bit) and x64 (64-bit) platforms. The SPARC and x86/64 versions are built from a single source tree.
- Sun sells SPARC as well as Opteron based hardware and of course, these are all certified against Solaris. However, it is not correct to think that you have to get the hardware from Sun in order to run Solaris. Solaris x86/64 runs on a lot of existing hardware; I've been running it on my Toshiba Tecra M2 laptop for more than a year without any problems. Here's the Hardware Compatibility List. Another way to see if your hardware can run Solaris 10 is to test it using the Solaris x86 Installation Check Tool.
- The DVDs that we gave away yesterday contain Solaris 10 Update 1 (S10U1). S10U1 includes Zones but not ZFS. The latest supported release of Solaris 10 is Update 2 (S10U2) and it includes ZFS. You can download S10U2 here. Solaris license is free. Support pricing starts at $120/yr.
- Non-RAC Oracle database is certified on Solaris Zones. There's a note on Metalink about this (I'll put the link later). RAC is not certified with Zones but RAC is certified to run from the global Zone.
- Solaris Zones home page is here and the Zones FAQ is here. The Apache Software Foundation uses Solaris Zones.
- Solaris ZFS home page is here. I also have a couple of ZFS posts here and here.
- DTrace home page is here. DTrace has been ported to Mac OS X and there are talks that Apple is also considering ZFS for OS X.
- Oracle's preferred OS for 64-bit development and deployment environment is Solaris. Here's the press release from Oracle's web site.
I think that's it for high-level notes and links. Now, quite a number of you also asked if I could post some tutorial type of examples on what we talked about yesterday. I will be doing that as soon as my schedule permits. So please check this blog often. Better yet, please subscribe.
That was a great day yesterday. Thanks for dropping by and I hope that at the very least, you now see why a lot of people say that Solaris 10 rocks! :)
