Oracle Solaris Reviews

I mainly used Solaris as a batch server.

Solaris's best features are high availability, robustness, and database hosting. Its file management system is also better than Linux.

Solaris' package management could be improved, especially in comparison to Linux.

Solaris' stability is rock solid.

The on-premise version of Solaris is scalable, but the cloud version isn't so much.

I would definitely recommend Solaris as an operating system to hold huge databases. I would give Solaris a rating of seven out of ten.

The most valuable feature of Oracle Solaris is the incremental backup that happens in the system.

Oracle Solaris can improve by supporting all the recent features that are in the market from other competitors.

I have been using Oracle Solaris for approximately a few years.

Oracle Solaris is an industry-working solution. However, Linux has taken over.

Oracle Solaris has to support the newer technologies that have come up in Oracle. The scalability could improve.

We have approximately 15 to 20 clients using this solution.

We had a challenge in terms of reaching out to the support. We had an issue installing Oracle Solaris in our lab environment and we had problems with configuring it with Linux.  We had a very hard time reaching out to Oracle support to fix the issue.

The initial setup of Oracle Solaris is straightforward.

The deployment took a longer time than normal since we did not receive support from Oracle which was frustrating. It took approximately two months.

The amount of people needed for the deployment depends on the environment. If the environment is small to medium then we would use between five to ten people. This includes engineers, developers, and testers.

The price of Oracle Solaris could be less expensive.

In my observation in the last two to three years, the support for Oracle Solaris has dropped. Oracle is more moving into Linux platforms.

I rate Oracle Solaris a six out of seven.

Too many features to count, the built in, low overhead integration is a huge plus, as is the ease of patching, the ability to use DTRACE to real time troubleshoot issues, the integrated security and most of all the performance.

The compliance command simplifies how complex security audits are performed, saving time. Also the patching is better than Linux, just as easy to patch, but with the integrated snapshots easier to back out of a patch. This saves hours of patch prep each time you patch a server. Enabling admin/server rations exceeded any linux or windows solution.

One cool feature with Oracle Linux, is the ability to patch without a reboot. Getting this working on Solaris would rock! With the new M7/S7 chips, better DTRACE visibility into the hardware acceleration offloading would be nice. Difficult to explain a server that is 90% idle but doing the workload of 4 Intel servers.

I have been using Solaris since the early 90s.

No major issues, the biggest challenge is retraining older Solaris 10 admins. The Linux admin shave no issues switching over.

No issues, recovery from patching is simple and I have yet to have a Solaris 11 system core dump. Troubleshooting RCA on a core dump is very easy though.

No issues scaling this, you can scale to over 1024 cores using the Fujitsu M10-s servers. I don;t think any Intel system can do that.

Customer service is what you would expect from a large multi-national company... but I rarely call support. The online tools are great.

The online tools are great, but the phone folks could use a little more training. But I rarely call them, as the online tools work %90 of the time.

I have used Linux, Windows, AIX and more. With Solaris 10, I stopped using AIX for any solutions, and focus on Solaris for larger systems, Linux for smaller systems and Windows when I need Microsoft. The new S7 is having me take a second look at using Solaris for the smaller systems as well.

Install is simple, the OS is preinstalled on the servers. Installing from ISO is simple,and Oracle also has several VMs you can download and deploy.

We use in-house staff most of the time. As I said, Linux admins can easily transition over. Patching is a great example.. linux is "yum update" and Solaris 11 is "pkg update"

The ROI is higher than Windows, due to the ease of patching and troubleshooting issues with DTRACE. Running down issues is wickedly fast, as you can use dtrace while the problem is happening.

Licensing is a core feature, as you can use zones and LDOMs to reduce the number of core you need to license Oracle product for. This is a huge saving for anyone using Oracle Database of Middleware.

Yes, we look at all options, and pick the OS that is the best match for the application. Solaris is more often or not the choice.

Have an open mind when looking at a new OS. Many things have changed in the last five years, you can not compare Solaris 11 to older versions.

Zones and resource allocation through capping and project is my favourite feature.

Lately, I have been using ZFS and I absolutely love it, but I didn't get much of a chance to explore it fully in a production environment.

This product performed wonderfully with my banking client, where I participated in implementation of virtualization through Solaris zones and then capping CPUs. We integrated zones with VCS clusters. It provided unmatchable stability, high availability, scalability and the best tunable performance.

We used it on M series, X series or the latest T series. It gave great reliable performance on all of the hardware.

I believe it's a great product and its latest versions are also really good. However, I believe Oracle is not utilising its full potential by restricting it best performance with Oracle hardware. Even though it can be run on SPARC, as well as Intel hardware, the problem lies with the way Oracle chooses to promote it. They are always saying that it performs best with Oracle hardware. They should understand current demand for open source and publish white papers for its performance on Intel hardware. And they must change their stratergy with Dell, HP and other blade server manufacturers and enable them to use Solaris and promote Solaris.

Also, they should promote Oracle Solaris with open source tools like HANA, Hadoop, Puppet, Chef, and Ansible. Meanwhile, they can continue to develop and promote their in-house competitive products as well.

To summarise, I feel the main issue lies with their promotion and sales strategies, and also their relations with competing hardware vendors and database/application vendors.

I have used Solaris for more than 8 years, almost all of my career, with all of my clients.

I have done many deployments, migrations and so on with Solaris or to Solaris, and I never faced a problem where I would have received a response from Oracle/Sun support that it was not possible. The product and its features work almost exactly as promised and the documentation available for the product.

Yes, I have seen bugs like zoneadmd hanging, or a zone getting stuck in a shutting down state, but they usually don't happen during deployments or planned activities.

Experience with Sun support was absolutely fantastic, but it deteriorated a little when Oracle support took over.

Most of the environments used Solaris, and we upgraded from Solaris 8/9 to Solaris 10.

In my experience, we mostly moved up from older hardware running Solaris 8 to Solaris 10 on new hardware. Complexities came in the form of an upgraded version of Veritas Cluster and volume manager or storage migration. Solaris itself didn't create any issues at OS level.

We mostly did implementation through in-house teams.

The most important thing is to have a sufficient downtime window and application or database support teams to be available to verify immediately.

I don't have much of an idea about pricing, but it should be decoupled from SPARC architecture.

Even though nowadays, I am using RedHat Linux, in my environment, I miss Solaris a lot.

Trust Solaris. It is still better than Linux in many ways.

We primarily use Solaris for compute storage. It is a server product that runs databases.

Our current equipment that Oracle Solaris runs on is approximately five years old and I only deal with it occasionally. This is a legacy product for us now and times have moved on.

This product handles databases well; they run on top of the operating system.

This product is not as flexible as other similar solutions on the market today. Times have moved on and there are newer operating systems that are better to use and more compatible with current technology.

I began working with Oracle Solaris between 15 and 16 years ago.

This is a stable product.

We've moved to other products recently, so scalability is no longer an issue for us. That said, the legacy version was slightly fixed.

We had approximately 25,000 end-users in some form or another.

We used to deal with technical support for this product. However, because it's older and things have not been changing, we have not had any recent experience with them.

When we were installing this product, it was straightforward. We haven't installed one in a while. It used to be maintained by our network team but as it's now a legacy product for us, we do not have dedicated staff to take care of it.

We were implementing this product with our in-house team.

There are no licensing fees but you can opt to pay for support.

The suitability of this product depends on the use case. There are other products that are more flexible and better to use these days. It was stable, so I would recommend it for some cases but more often than not, we wouldn't use it anymore.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use Oracle Solaris to develop and support our VDCF (Virtual Datacenter Cloud Framework) management and monitoring software. Several virtual machines (LDoms and Zones) are used on SPARC and x86 Servers.

We are able to deploy new environments very quickly and securely. Using the virtualization features, we can migrate the environments very flexibly between our servers.

Solaris includes two virtualization solutions: LDoms for SPARC and Solaris Zones. Both solutions can be combined to create private clouds. Solaris Zones is ideal to separate applications and to migrate from older to current hardware. LDoms is very efficient because it uses the hardware hypervisor of the SPARC servers.
Both technologies increase Security, because they separate the applications from each other. Using the Security Compliance Framework we are sure the systems are setup properly

Patching without downtime would be nice.

Update 08/2021: Live Paching of Kernel is now available. We applied IDRs successfully on several servers.

I have been using the solution for more than 14 years now.

We had no issues with the stability.

Solaris is very robust and scalable. No issues so far scaling it.

Oracle offers a good online support portal called "My Oracle Support", which includes a big knowledge base. Because Oracle is a very large organization, it sometimes takes a bit too much time for support requests to reach the right support engineer.

Neutral

Used Solaris 10 before, but Solaris 11 is much easier and faster with patching.
Based on BootEnvironments and ZFS Solaris 11 always offers a failback.

The initial setup is straightforward. Oracle has in-depth admin manuals. To speed up deployments, we implemented our own deployment and management framework VDCF.

We implemented it with our in-house team based on Oracle's best practices documents. With virtualization, we recommend to first define a standard on how to deploy and then to deploy using that standard, avoiding any variation. There are so many options, but our favorite is the fully-virtualized LDom with applications installed into Solaris Zones.

When buying a server from Oracle, all the software is included -- OS, virtualization and patches. There are no hidden costs. We like the long life cycle of Solaris and the SPARC servers. There's no need to replace the hardware every two to three years, and we have a life cycle of five years and more.

Use deployment tools for automation and avoid doing everything manually. Deployment tools help to avoid errors and create a standardized environment.

We primarily use Oracle Solaris for its virtualization capabilities to host critical applications.

The platform has valuable stability.

More monitoring tools could be included in the product.

We have been using Oracle Solaris for ten years. At present, we use the latest version.

There have been specific instances while booting the system where we had to roll back the product to a previous version due to certain risks or issues. I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

We manage around six customers for Oracle Solaris. It is a scalable product.

A lot of resolutions are already available in the product's knowledge base. Thus, we don't have to contact the support team frequently.

Oracle Solaris is pre-installed in our environment. Thus, it is simple to customize, and it takes a few hours to complete. One executive is required to work on the deployment and maintenance.

The product is inexpensive.

I rate Oracle Solaris a nine out of ten. I advise others to ensure they can support the setup for the foreseeable future.

We use the solution as an internal operating system. 

Setting up Oracle Solaris can be complex because it requires more commands than other systems. 

The product is stable. 

We plan to increase the tool's usage. Our organization has many users because we deploy applications on servers, and many users connect to these applications.

The solution's support is fine. 

The to0ol's installation can be completed in two hours. 

We don't use an authorized license. 

Oracle Solaris is a good solution, but I don't think it is widely used. Most companies prefer Linux or Windows. However, its security features are good. I rate the overall product a six out of ten. Users need to be mindful of the tool's flexibility.