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April 26, 2005
Solaris 10 Investigation
Back in August I wrote a short post on my personal blog about Solaris 10. Now more than 6 month's later I've finally had the opportunity to install Sun's new OS.
The installation process was pretty much identical to any other version of Solaris I've installed and somewhat disappointingly took most of the afternoon. On the plus side the installation went without a hitch and the machine was soon up and running on our local network.
Although I haven't had chance to delve into the new features in any detail yet, I am hopeful that I'll have a fully functioning Talis LMS up and running by the end of the week.
In terms of the new features I’m keen to check out the benefits of Solaris Containers, a technology that I’m sure could be put to good use in our own Data Centre. Basically Solaris containers allow you to give several different applications their own private environment.
This ability to have virtualised systems within a single server is appealing and I'm sure will be useful for Server consolidation. As an example there are a number of Servers in our own Data Centre that for various technical and historic reasons require their own operating environment, while only consuming small amounts of CPU and memory resources. Solaris Containers could quite easily be used to move these environments onto a single server.
Of course Solaris Containers isn’t the only new addition in Solaris 10; Solaris Dynamic Tracing or DTrace is another potentially useful piece of software. According to Sun
"DTrace gives you performance and operating data on everything that goes on in your computer and allows you to pinpoint exactly where the bottlenecks are."
Assuming this software does what it says in the tin it could be a very useful tool indeed.
Over the next few weeks I’ll be looking further into the performance, security and availability benefits of Solaris 10 and will post what I find here.
I am confident that it won’t be long before Solaris 10 is running on a customer LMS. If you’d like to be involved let me know.
Posted by Jim Prince at April 26, 2005 09:00 AM
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