Linked by Matthias Breiter on Wed 25th May 2005 17:39 UTC
With a (relatively) big advertising campaign SUN promoted Solaris 10 (also known as SunOS 5.10). Referring to SUN, with the "revolutionary" JAVADesktop 2 and a lot of new features and improvements, Solaris 10 should be the best OS today. Solaris is free for SPARC owners and for private use or evaluation purpose it's also freely available on the x86. While Solaris actually is kind of a legend, I thought "Hu, this could be an interesting alternative on my PC". Thought, went on and downloaded the ISOs. Read on to see how an average user (me) have experienced Solaris.
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This is my first os news post so if I don't flame well enough forgive me. :-)
When you make a sandwich in your kitchen you use a knife, not a commercial meat slicer from a butcher shop. In the same way, trying to use Solaris for a desktop OS is pointless. It will not meet expectations because it is designed for something completely different.
For the poster who asked what are the "under the hood" things Solaris can do that linux and windows can't - here are a couple simple examples.
First, Zones. A developer calls and says "I need my own server with the root password for critical development work. We have no budget for a new machine. And I need it in an hour." An impossible task, right? Not if you're running Solaris 10. You go to your development server, create a new zone running its own copy of the OS, and give the developer the root password. Done in 5 minutes.
The developer now sees his own hostname, filesystems, IP address - everything. From what he can tell it is just like you built a box for him. But it is running on your development server along with however many other users you gave zones on it. And best of all, nothing he does in his zone can affect any other zone or the box itself making this solution 100% safe. There are products like VMware and Windows Virtual Server which can do some subset of what Solaris Zones can do, but they cost money and require installing extra software. Zones are an inherent feature of Solaris 10.
Second, Domains. You spend a few hundred grand on a production server with 32 processors, 256 gig of ram, and 16 network and HBA cards. You assign 24 of the processors to the database server domain, 4 to the web server domain, and 4 to the app server domain. You split up the memory and I/O cards proportionately. Each domain is 100% independent and running its own OS. You can even have different versions of solaris running in each domain if you wanted to (maybe your database wants to be on Solaris 9 but your app server wants to be on Solaris 10). It is exactly like you purchased 3 servers to implement your 3-tier architecture, but you get it all in one box saving you tons on power, cooling, datacenter space, and administrative overhead.
One day a CPU in your database domain fails. But due to the availability features in Solaris there is no crash. The box alerts you of the failure, you call Sun, and they replace the dead CPU ON THE FLY - no downtime, not even a reboot. For the time your box was down a CPU your performance stats decreased a few percent due to the extra load on the running processors. Otherwise nobody but the admin who called in the service order ever noticed.
The next week you have a major release for a new product and expect very heavy web traffic. You decide to move 4 CPUs, some memory, and one of the I/O cards from the database domain to the web domain. Again you can do this on the fly with no downtime. After the traffic spike passes you move those resources back to the database domain.
That is the kind of functionality running servers on Solaris can give you. Of course, that is completely useless to a desktop computer user. But if you are running mission critical apps where 100% uptime is a must, no other OS is in the same league as Solaris.