Solaris 10: Sun's creative and full-featured operating system aimed at everyone from the home user to
enterprise server customers.
For some time now, Sun has been trying to push its way into non-proprietary Unix markets, and Solaris 10 is its crowning achievement. An abundance of innovative new features, mostly aimed at administrators rather than users, contributes further to Solaris 10's value proposition. An interesting balance of administrative features and support for new hardware implies Sun is trying hard to maintain its current niche, as well as move into server and workstation territories where Linux has encroached.
Sun's claims of lightning-fast boot times are well-founded. The Solaris 10 kernel loaded almost three times as fast as Solaris 9 on the same hardware.
According to Chris Ratcliffe, group manager, Solaris Marketing, the company is, "absolutely 100 percent dedicated" to making Solaris useful on the x86 and 64-bit AMD architectures. As Sun has attempted x86 support twice before and later left it behind, this is an interesting turn of events.
Version 10 continues the trend of using the same codebase for x86- and SPARC-based systems. Of course, hardware-specific features will not work in the absence of the hardware, like Sun's high availability features on large mainframes.
Overall, we are inclined to agree with Mr. Ratcliffe: Sun is dedicated.
Sun has already begun selling competitively priced dual 64-bit AMD servers in preparation for the Solaris 10 release later this month. Solaris 10 comes with true 64-bit AMD support, which results in a three-fold speed improvement out of the box, compared to a system running the current 32-bit x86 Solaris. Not really an apples-to-apples comparison but an interesting statistic nonetheless.
Installation
Bearing in mind that there's no guarantee Solaris 10 will run on everything x86 flavored, we tested it first on commodity hardware. Using a dual Pentium III and Intel motherboard, Solaris 10 (beta 72) installed without a hitch. The installer was quite resource-intensive and reminiscent of the Solaris 9 GUI install with a little Red Hat flair thrown in.
We noticed that when connecting to the serial port of a server-class motherboard, the supporting console redirection still causes the familiar text mode installer to start. Also, for those installing Solaris on any of the popular new Sun Fire V class SPARC servers, text is the only option, since the servers lack video capabilities.
Solaris 10 now has four CDs, but, as is the case with Solaris 9, only the first CD is needed for a basic install. Although a bit prettier than Solaris 9, the GUI installer definitely takes some time to load. Once it starts, it's the same old song and dance. Partition your drive, set up networking information, select package set, go get coffee. Anyone who has installed Red Hat or any RPM-based Linux should be able to complete a basic Solaris GUI install successfully. This is another key component of Sun's move toward being an operating system for all systems.
One blaringly obvious drawback is that the Solaris 10 installer seems to claim a disk for its own. While it is possible to run Solaris 10 on a system running another operating system, the installer doesn't provide an obvious way to do this, and the documentation is of little help. The installer doesn't offer a way to resize or move existing NTFS or ext2/3 partitions, and UFS can't be resized. Doing this is non-trivial and requires the manual layout of a partition for Solaris.
The installer seems to have some fairly advanced features that didn't fare well when tested. Although installing the automatic, non-custom Solaris 10 worked adequately every time, choosing "custom" or "upgrade" in the installer lead us down perilous roads.
Using a Sun Blade 150 workstation running Solaris 9 in a very LDAP/NFS centric environment, we started the "upgrade" install from beta72 SPARC Solaris images. These were downloaded from Sun's public Web site. Once the installer finished its initialization, it asked where we'd like to backup the existing install — another useful feature.
We chose the automatic upgrade install, which consumes 2.5 GB of space. However, this install option failed because our partitions were not large enough for all the features Sun wanted to install. Restarting the installer and choosing a custom upgrade brought the installer to a package selection area. We began deleting large features, and the installer dutifully reported package dependencies. This was mostly an educated guessing game, but we carved out a small enough system to let the installer continue the upgrade using established partitions.
The installer finished without asking for any of the other three CDs. A reboot seemed to succeed, until the display manager tried running: It produced a beautiful segmentation fault and an abrupt return to the text login. Nobody really expected an upgrade to work at all, but this was quite impressive, up until the end.
We were also pleased to note that Sun's claims of lightning-fast boot times are well-founded. The Solaris 10 kernel loaded almost three times as fast as Solaris 9 on the same hardware.
To its credit, Solaris 10 has features no other operating system on the market can claim. That's right, Sun Microsystems is innovating in the operating system realm again, and it is doing it well.
DTrace: The Sun marketing department states that 30-fold speed improvements are achievable when using DTrace to identify system bottlenecks. This is based on a comparison of 32-bit x86 Solaris running on an AMD64 computer.
Assuming Sun can deliver on its amazing performance promises, Solaris 10 is a viable option for all servers, even those not running on Sun hardware.
DTrace is a Dynamic Tracing facility built into Solaris. It enables both programmers and administrators to quickly identify system problems by allowing them to look into exactly what userland programs or the operating system is doing. DTrace has a 41-chapter manual, a large part of which explains the usage of D, the DTrace language. Suspiciously similar to Awk, the D language provides a method by which administrators can ask arbitrary questions of the operating system. With more than 37,000 test points in the kernel, DTrace provides the most flexible method on the market for diagnosis of in-depth problems.
ZFS: ZFS, or Zetabyte File System, is a completely new file system that Sun developed. The first of its kind, ZFS integrates a volume manager into the file system itself. This enables Solaris 10 to create a "pool" of disks and then dynamically allocate space from them — in a way that is transparent to the user. If you need more space on a partition, simply add another disk to the pool, and tell Solaris to use more space. ZFS is quite amazing, but it will not be ready for initial Solaris 10 release. Sun plan to include ZFS with the first update, which is currently slated for six months after the January 2005 release.
Linux Binary Compatibility: Also not shipping with Solaris 10, is Linux binary compatibility. Sun has managed to support the execution of Linux programs natively. This means there is no memory-hogging emulation layer; Solaris simply understands the Linux ELF binary format. The caveat is that you must have all Linux libraries on which a given Linux program depends installed on that instance of Solaris.
Assuming this feature delivers on its promises, it will be a big win for Sun. Similar support in other operating systems requires a slow emulation layer.
Containers: Formerly named Zones, Containers are an invaluable tool. Containers isolate applications and processes from the rest of the system, without the need to run a virtual machine. Implemented very much like FreeBSD Jails, Containers are just like their own operating system, but in actuality they share the same memory and kernel. Containers have their own IP address, and the only way to communicate with an application inside a Container is via network services.
Other Noteworthy Features: Solaris Fault Management monitors for abnormalities and isolates malfunctioning devices to avoid complete system failure. Process Rights Management allows users to be granted full rights for specific processes, making root access unnecessary for all but a few administrators. Sun also improved X server, abandoning the homegrown Xsun in favor of Xorg.
Conclusions
Sun changed gears completely for Solaris 10, focusing on performance and machines with one to four processors of x86 and AMD64 origin. Sun told us the operating system's goal is simple: Beat Red Hat. In benchmarking Solaris 10, everything, from boot times to primitive read() and write() operations, has been timed. The marketing department claims it has met, and exceeded that original goal.
We installed Solaris 10 on a wide variety of consumer hardware that included five laptops. Based on our experience we feel comfortable stating that anything listed in the Hardware Compatibility List on Sun's BigAdmin Web Portal should function seamlessly with Solaris 10.
Solaris' innovative and unique features set it apart from the crowd of proprietary Unix operating systems, and also launch Sun into the world of free desktops and servers. Solaris 10 itself is free, but support is not. Assuming Sun can deliver on its amazing performance promises, Solaris 10 is a viable option for all servers, even those not running on Sun hardware.
Pros: Amazing performance and support for x86 and AMD64 platforms; Innovative features in both performance and usability categories; Easier to install and maintain than previous Solaris versions. Cons: No viable patch management improvements, aside from the same automatic vs. fully manual choice; Some important features will not be available with the initial release; Much manaul configuration necessary for it to coexist on the same physical drive as another operating system.
Reviewed by: Charlie Schluting Original Review Date: 1/5/2005 Original Review Version: 10
Futureproofing/scalability .Net compliant 64-bit port Cluster support IPv6 support J2EE 1.4 certified J2EE 1.4 compliant
Other Features Multiple logs Supports Microsoft ISAPI Virtual servers Web-based user interface
Programming/Scripting Includes source Own API Own scripting/batch language Supports external scripting/batch language
Security ActiveDirectory authentication Antispam features Antivirus features Built-in firewall capabilities Built-in proxy capabilities Internal user access scheme LDAP authentication Other/system authentication SSL (hardware) SSL (software)
Support Commercial support available Forum support Free telephone support GSA scheduled Mailing list support Service-level agreement offerings available
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