Oracle Solaris Reviews

Built-in virtualisation (Zones / LDOMS), ZFS, SMF, and FMA.

By standardising the infrastructure, we were able to reduce the number of physical hosts. We got rid of file system corruption (thanks to ZFS). Enlarging the file system was as easy as eating the candy.

The product itself is great. I would like to see whether other companies start developing for Solaris.

I have been using Solaris 11 for four years and Sun Cluster 4.1 for three years.

I’ve never had a problem with deployment (well-configured Jumpstart and AI). We have noted almost no hardware failures. Due to Solaris Cluster 4.1’s Live Migration future, we have achieved 99.9999% service uptime.

The level of customer service varies depending on the geo zone, but mostly Oracle support is very good and quick with providing the resolution for problems.

Because we have designed our boxes in a very complex way, the setup took some time and it’s not a straightforward (click, click) setup. It requires skills to create a well-functioning environment. That is why people who have never worked with Solaris or had “one date” with it should never set up any Solaris box.

We implemented the product in-house. I recommend reading the documentation and not assuming that if you know Linux, you know Solaris.

Concurrently we have used HP blades with VMware for our Linux environment. Due to fact that not all of the applications were running on Solaris, it has cost us much more effort to make those three work together. It is more time consuming to deploy VM on that environment than on Solaris.

If you have never done it or you do not have a sufficient amount of experience, hire an external consultant or an Oracle consultant to do the job.

It's solid in terms of security; secured systems.

In terms of monitoring, they have quite a bit right now, but it could be a little bit better, especially with all of the virtualized resources.

I have been using the database for 15 years.

It has been stable, pretty much.

Down time has not been because of the OS.

Under load, it has scaled well.

It will definitely meet our needs going into the future.

Technical support is pretty good. Sun used to support it, and now it’s Oracle. We use technical support mostly for the database, and now both the software, the OS, as well as the hardware, are all from the same vendor.

The company has had it for, pretty much, since I joined the company.

The upgrades are pretty straightforward, now-a-days. You can do live upgrades and things like that pretty well.

I definitely recommend it.

When I’m looking at vendors to work with, I definitely look for one with a good reputation of being reliable because that provides a solid foundation for the many components that will run on it. It's definitely not like the sort of software that you can get from some new start-up, which might provide more features and value. The product and the vendor have to be proven.