What's Next for Solaris, Linux at Oracle?
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 29th Jan 2010 16:08 UTC
Oracle and SUN "Several of the concerns about Oracle's acquisition of Sun have revolved around how Unix technologies led by Sun would continue under the new ownership. As it turns out, Solaris users might not have much to worry about, as Oracle executives on Wednesday affirmed their commitment to preserving the efforts. In the case of Solaris, Oracle had already been a big supporter of the rival Linux operating system. Oracle has its own Enterprise Linux offering, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, the idea that Linux and Solaris are mutually exclusive is a false choice."
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dvzt
Member since:
2008-10-23

All of your points are very good and it's true that most of the virtualization in AIX is hardware based but just like Zones, AIX has OS virtuailzation as well. It's called WPAR (as in work partition). In the end though, both platforms rely mostly on hardware when it comes to true virtualization with POWER having the added advantage of hardware virtualization support built in from the low end all the way up and having inherited all the tech from the mainframe.

The two things that AIX is missing are obviously DTRACE and ZFS, the latter of which anybody would have to admit is a trully superb filesystem, but if I wanted serious hardware virtualization and had the choice, I'd go for AIX any day. The ability to add and extract servers from a virtualized pool, live migrate from one server to another and do all this through an extremely simple to use web interface without needing to resort to the command line puts pretty much anything Sun has to shame, for the moment.


I agree that AIX+POWER probably has better virtualization capabilities than Solaris+SPARC. After all IBM has all the mainframe know-how. I wouldn't say that Sun should be ashamed, as most of things which you outlined can be done with other tools, like Sun Cluster (as for live migration).


Addendum: I wouldn't go so far as to call Enterprise Linux an oxymoron. I've installed SLES on POWER for a TSM backup server and Linux uses the inherited low downtime capabilities of the POWER platform just as well as AIX does. Thanks to the tools IBM have developed for LoP (Linux on POWER), it is just as totally trivial to swap out CPUs, memory and expansion cards as it is using AIX. If the kernel couldn't handle hot-swapping, then I'd think you'd have a point, but that is demonstrably not the case.


I'm still waiting for Linus to acknowledge the need for stable kernel API and ABI. Until that day, I can't take Linux seriously, sorry.

Reply Parent Score: 2

SReilly Member since:
2006-12-28

I agree that AIX+POWER probably has better virtualization capabilities than Solaris+SPARC. After all IBM has all the mainframe know-how. I wouldn't say that Sun should be ashamed, as most of things which you outlined can be done with other tools, like Sun Cluster (as for live migration).

I forgot all about Sun Cluster so yeah, you are spot on. Still, I've worked intensely with both, though it's been a while since I worked in a SPARC environment, and I have to say that for me, Virtualization on POWER kicks it's rear end. In the end though, they are both excellent systems and preferences do vary.

I'm still waiting for Linus to acknowledge the need for stable kernel API and ABI. Until that day, I can't take Linux seriously, sorry.

Lol! Fair enough :-)

Reply Parent Score: 2