Hi all
I am currently running Solaris 11.3 on my home server. I went with Solaris 11 because I was a Solaris 10 + OpenSolaris admin for many years, so it is what I know. Plus I have a free license for Solaris 11, so licensing/patches are not a concern for me.
But now I am thinking I made a mistake, and I would much rather be with the open source community, where new development is happening. I had already been thinking that for a little while, and then when I saw that LX zones are back in OmniOS, it made me decide I really should move. I used Linux 2.4 zones in Solaris 10 a lot and would love to play with them again.
Plus I keep forgetting that Illumos-based distros also have KVM - I am used to using VirtualBox for VMs on Solaris, but KVM looks like it will be nicer to manage.
I have one final opportunity to easily move, as I just bought a new server/chassis. So I can easily install OmniOS in parallel on the new machine and check all is OK, and then move across my pool. I know that I will need to re-create my ZFS pool as unfortunately when I re-created it last week I made it as version 37. But I have some spare drives, and the array currently only contains 5TB of data, so it will be possible to make a backup on some spare drives and then re-create the full pool on OmniOS and fairly quickly migrate the data across.
My question is: is there anything I should be aware of migrating from Solaris 11 to OmniOS? Besides the ZFS incompatibility that I know about.
I mean things like: are there major OS features that won't be available, or software that is not available? I assume OmniOS can run 99.9% of Solaris 10/11 software, but maybe there are notable exceptions? Or popular software that is in the Solaris 11 repo but not OmniOS? (Although there's always OpenCSW). Is it possible to install and use Sun Studio without problems?
It is only a home server so I am not using a very complex setup. But I like to experiment with advanced features, even if they are not vital.
I already know that OmniOS doesn't really have a desktop component, which I don't mind too much. In the past I did like having an X desktop in a zone, in case I wanted to run any graphical installer or similar. But that's not a big deal, I have an OSX install at home so I can always export DISPLAY. I did briefly think about OpenIndiana instead, because it still has a desktop, but it doesn't yet have LX zones and I get the feeling OmniOS is more regularly updated.
I don't really know what else to ask exactly, as I don't know what could be different. I have googled a fair bit, but I can't find much info about advantages/disadvantages, besides licensing/patching. Maybe that means there aren't really many differences, which would be great.
Any help/advice would be very much appreciated from anyone who knows both Solaris 11 and OmniOS well.
I am currently running Solaris 11.3 on my home server. I went with Solaris 11 because I was a Solaris 10 + OpenSolaris admin for many years, so it is what I know. Plus I have a free license for Solaris 11, so licensing/patches are not a concern for me.
But now I am thinking I made a mistake, and I would much rather be with the open source community, where new development is happening. I had already been thinking that for a little while, and then when I saw that LX zones are back in OmniOS, it made me decide I really should move. I used Linux 2.4 zones in Solaris 10 a lot and would love to play with them again.
Plus I keep forgetting that Illumos-based distros also have KVM - I am used to using VirtualBox for VMs on Solaris, but KVM looks like it will be nicer to manage.
I have one final opportunity to easily move, as I just bought a new server/chassis. So I can easily install OmniOS in parallel on the new machine and check all is OK, and then move across my pool. I know that I will need to re-create my ZFS pool as unfortunately when I re-created it last week I made it as version 37. But I have some spare drives, and the array currently only contains 5TB of data, so it will be possible to make a backup on some spare drives and then re-create the full pool on OmniOS and fairly quickly migrate the data across.
My question is: is there anything I should be aware of migrating from Solaris 11 to OmniOS? Besides the ZFS incompatibility that I know about.
I mean things like: are there major OS features that won't be available, or software that is not available? I assume OmniOS can run 99.9% of Solaris 10/11 software, but maybe there are notable exceptions? Or popular software that is in the Solaris 11 repo but not OmniOS? (Although there's always OpenCSW). Is it possible to install and use Sun Studio without problems?
It is only a home server so I am not using a very complex setup. But I like to experiment with advanced features, even if they are not vital.
I already know that OmniOS doesn't really have a desktop component, which I don't mind too much. In the past I did like having an X desktop in a zone, in case I wanted to run any graphical installer or similar. But that's not a big deal, I have an OSX install at home so I can always export DISPLAY. I did briefly think about OpenIndiana instead, because it still has a desktop, but it doesn't yet have LX zones and I get the feeling OmniOS is more regularly updated.
I don't really know what else to ask exactly, as I don't know what could be different. I have googled a fair bit, but I can't find much info about advantages/disadvantages, besides licensing/patching. Maybe that means there aren't really many differences, which would be great.
Any help/advice would be very much appreciated from anyone who knows both Solaris 11 and OmniOS well.
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