Result of the "How long do you wait before Solaris 11 gets on your prod systems?"

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Result of the "How long do you wait before Solaris 11 gets on your prod systems?"

Thursday, June 23. 2011

At approx. 16:20 the poll had the following outcome:

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in English, Solaris, Sun/Oracle at 16:20 | Comments (16) | Trackbacks (0)

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...you forgot the "No more Solaris" option....

#1 Gabriele Bulfon on 2011-06-23 20:33 (Reply)

I'm not interested in that when i'm asking how long they will wait until people migrate ...

#1.1 Joerg Moellenkamp on 2011-06-23 22:00 (Reply)

If we are talking about home or desktop office use, that is fine. Nobody else would cry after crash or data loss. But for production server workloads? Never do that with any OS.

#1.1.1 alain on 2011-06-24 00:03 (Reply)

Even when you load ran well on OpenSolaris, Solaris Express 11 and you have a really good test to check your workload?

Of course you are right ... with no idea about a new release, you shouldn't use it on day one ... however it's not the way that the world sees the stuff that is Solaris 11 the first time, at least that's valid for large parts. People had ample time to test their environment of S11X ... the people reading here aren't morons ... okay ... a few are a little bit strange ...

So i would understand them, when they switch from S11X to S11 on day one after running their tests ...

May be it's different with your prefered OS vendor

#1.1.1.1 Joerg M. (Homepage) on 2011-06-24 00:41 (Reply)

It prooves Solaris is a religion. 16 people (quite high percentage) would migrate to S11 immediately without even asking if it's stable or compatible with software they use.

#2 alain on 2011-06-23 21:23 (Reply)

Or it's just a sign, that they test/tested their applications with Solaris 11 Express and that they are confident that it fits their needs ...

#2.1 Joerg M. (Homepage) on 2011-06-23 21:58 (Reply)

Some of us have been evaluating S11 Express internally for some time now so when S11 comes out we will be ready to quickly start using them. Ha some are even running S11 Express in a production already. Before S11 comes out S11 Express will be for about 1 year in the market and since it was basically just another build of SXCE/OpenSolaris when it came out lots of people have been deploying and testing S11 for much longer actually.

#2.2 Robert on 2011-06-24 11:00 (Reply)

alain> It prooves Solaris is a religion

Actually, it proves that some people do more "homework" more than others.

Architects are looking for solutions with value in order to reduce costs, minimize risk, and gain competitive advantage in the market place.

alain> migrate to S11 immediately without even asking if it's stable or compatible with software they use

OpenSolaris and now Solaris Express have been around next to forever. When code runs there, it will run just fine under Solaris 11 - "Stability" and "Compatibility" are already answered.

The only question which you [strangely] did not reference centers around performance. The high thread speed of the old IV+ platforms are not expected to be supported, creating a performance risk.

This new risk will slow migration to Solaris 11, since Oracle is forcing the business to assume 3 business simultaneous risks:
1) change OS
2) change physical platform
3) change performance characterisics

Data centers which have certified Solaris SPARC often have certified POWER AIX, RedHat Intel, and MS Windows Intel - I have not seen many data centers certify Solaris Intel... there are multiple options to choose from.

Supporting the UlltraSPARC IV+ under Solaris 11 would break the risk into multiple steps, offering better continuity to existing Solaris customers. Oracle is increasing the temptation to move off of SPARC IV+ based Solaris, since risk #3 is mitigated with high-performance POWER or Intel threads.

If SPARC Solaris 11 servers need to be stood up for development, test, release management, production, high availability, and disaster recovery to consider moving to Solaris 11... the next question is: why not move the app to xyz operating system in virtual platform where we don't need to buy all new hardware?

If newer (T4? M2?) platforms will still support Solaris 10, there is still an opportunity for Oracle to decouple some risks.

I am personally hoping the T4 thread speed to be similar to the IV+ thread speed... if the T4 will run Solaris 10 (as well as Solaris 8 & Solaris 9 Containers) and if the per-thread performance is similar - then there still is a moving forward path.

One of my apps were the first to move to Solaris 10 and the first apps to use Solaris [Sparse] Zones in my company. Solaris 10 Sparse Zones offered a significant cost benefit, time to deployment flexibility, and competitive pricing advantage.

I want to be under Solaris 11 ASAP, due to a particular set of new features. The loss of Sparse Zones is VERY painful, but there are some other under-valued features in Solaris 11 that make a very big difference in costing & application availability. Oracle is not making the uprade to Solaris 11 path any easier, right now.

Religion has more to do with Solaris hatred rather than Solaris endorsement. Solaris endorsement has more to do with features, value, stability, and compatibility. Not everone needs a car that goes 200,000 miles with powered windows, but hating a car manufacturer because they are the only one to have powered windows with great equipment longevity is a little bizarre to me... I also cheer when competing manufacturer cars get oiled hand cranks and 100,000 mile warranties, since it makes the marketplace more competitive!

The market will see how much Oracle really wants to be in the data center hardware and operating system businesses in the next 1-2 years. Maybe Oracle will reduce more risks and remove more pain in Release 2 or 3 of Solaris 11.

#2.3 DavidH (Homepage) on 2011-06-24 21:47 (Reply)

What about, never. We are transitioning to an illumOS based distrib.

#3 Mike La Spina (Homepage) on 2011-06-23 21:27 (Reply)

no commercial software in use ?

#3.1 Joerg M. (Homepage) on 2011-06-23 21:55 (Reply)

In fairness, I was one of the "Wait?" respondents. Mainly as there was not a "I'm using it now" option.

I am currently running 11 dev on my workstation and notebook to do my day job. Counts to me as production.

alan.

#4 Alan Hargreaves (Homepage) on 2011-06-23 23:59 (Reply)

Biggest issue is an enterprise deployment tool. Having to carve our teeth in OC11gr1 at the moment. That's a tool that needs more whitepapers and use cases rather than straight product documentation.

#5 Ian McGinley (Homepage) on 2011-06-24 02:46 (Reply)

Migrations are always application driven.

Very rarely the OS is a driver for upgrades.

#6 Jobito on 2011-06-24 10:59 (Reply)

I wonder how many application vendors will delay certification or not certify their applications under Solaris 11 since older hardware is not supported?

#6.1 DavidH (Homepage) on 2011-06-24 22:03 (Reply)

Dunno about you, but we light up Zones for our vendors so they can get started on Solaris 11. Niche application stack, but we cater to their requirements and they have even been instrumenting their app with DTrace probes to improvement performance and bug fixes.

#6.1.1 Ian M (Homepage) on 2011-06-26 23:00 (Reply)

In our environment, we can't crank up a real development platform until the OS is certified to run in the data center.

Solaris 11 Express is not a certified DataCenter operating system in my company. When Solaris 11 is released, it might not get certified since existing development platforms will mostly not run under Solaris 11. (New equipment often gets placed in production, old equipment gets recycled for development.)

Few of the apps I support are certified to run in a Zone, so deploying one big box with multiple zones is insufficient. We use Sparse Zones for non-off-the-shelf apps, in order to gain a competitive advantage in the Managed Services arena.

As far as DTrace, I have not personally used it for debugging code with. I do integration, at a higher level (shell, awk, X, sql, http, etc.)

I am turning up a project, trying to leverage DTrace - but not for debugging (as developers and system admins may use it) or analytics (as embedded systems vendors may use it) - but actually to supplement a production run-time need to keep applications in-sync across a cluster.

Sometimes, a good feature is so out-of-the-box, it takes awhile to land a good use.

#6.1.1.1 DavidH (Homepage) on 2011-07-03 19:48 (Reply)

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