Oracle Solaris 11.4

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gea

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If you buy a new Sparc system with the Solaris Unix you get the promise of support, development and bugfixes until 2034. This is quite unique in the IT world.

Oracle Solaris with native ZFS v37 is currently the fastest ZFS with some unique features like native ZFS encryption, faster sequential resilvering or improved dedup. This makes it somehow superior to the current Open-ZFS. As long as Oracle delivers Solaris and as long as napp-it can work on Solaris I will support Solaris.

As Oracle switched its focus more to a Cloud related business I would not expect the same level of OS or Server development like in the past.

Most users install napp-it ontop of the free Open-ZFS Solaris fork Illumos with distributions like OmniOS or OpenIndiana. The development of Illumos is completely independent from Oracle and some of the advanced Oracle ZFS features like ZFS encryption or sequential resilvering are on the way to Open-ZFS in general (BSD, Illumos, Linux, OSX and propably Windows in GitHub - openzfsonwindows/ZFSin: OpenZFS ports).
 

gea

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mstone

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If you buy a new Sparc system with the Solaris Unix you get the promise of support, development and bugfixes until 2034. This is quite unique in the IT world.
You'd have to be nuts to actually believe such a promise to the extent that it influences your IT decisions at all.
 

dragonme

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@gea

more important since solaris is off it its own bubble with ZFS.. how long will it take for smb3 filter down to ominos?

more interested in oracle finally catching up with resumable zfs send and other new zfs features which hopefully will also filter to omni... or perhaps if these features make it into the sun solaris storage server simulator VM.. it might be compelling enough to jump to that if it can at lease read existing pools read only to do a send-recv from my backup pool to migrate all that data from omnios to solaris 11.4/sun storage server
 
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gea

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The main advantage of Solaris over Open-ZFS Solarish is performance, faster sequential resilvering, encryption with a key per filesystem and Dedup2 (ZFS v.43). On service level it adds NFS 4.1 and SMB3 with the kernelbased/ ZFS embedded Solarish SMB server.

ZFS replication may work from Illumos to Solaris but I doubt the other way will work. Propably you must use rsync.

On Open-ZFS Illumos I would expect ZFS encryption later this year and sequential resilvering in 2018. SMB3 is in NexentaStor5 so it is in the Nexentafork of Illumos. We have to wait until it is upstreamed hopely with the help of Nexenta.

I have no info about the state of NFS 4.1. or improvements in dedup. This can last.

I have no knowledge about the Sun/Oracle Solaris appliance.
 

gea

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Compatibility of Solaris 11.4 Public Beta with napp-it

currently napp-it is not working due problems with the Perl module Expect (IO::Tty not compiling)
This should create a Tty.so file in /root/.cpan that is needed for napp-it If someone has success, please report.

Problem: Expect is compiled via
perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Expect
exit

-> gives an error with IO:Tty

Info about the beta repository
Solaris 11.4 Beta is pre configured for the default stable (nonworking with the Beta) repository and comes without a compiler installed.
You must switch repository to

PUBLISHER TYPE STATUS P LOCATION
solaris origin online F https://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/beta/

For access to this repository, you must register at https://pkg-register.oracle.com/register/repos/
where you can then download a certificate and a key and where you MUST accept the license to get access. Copy cert and key ex to /root, then wait some time until you get access.. What I did then.

1. remove old repository
pkg unset-publisher solaris

2. add beta repository with the cert and key
pkg set-publisher -c /root/pkg.oracle.com.certificate.pem -k /root/pkg.oracle.com.key.pem -g https://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/beta solaris

3. add a compiler ex pkg install gcc-5
and try to compile Expect

4. see Solaris 11.4 Beta | Oracle Community
 
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dragonme

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@mstone

I agree.. if I were a CTO and someone came to me with a plan to get into an EOL system like solaris at this point.. they would be fired.. all it takes is a 're-org', a 'fake bankruptcy', 'merger' and solaris can get out of any service contract promise way earlier than promised... and leave everyone in the learch ...
 

gea

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Years ago Sun was the most innovative firm with the approach to be the last major IT firm to fight against Windows Server. This is history.

Oracle today set its focus to the cloud and set Linux over Solaris. Sparc, hardware and Solaris (Sparc or X86) is no longer their core business. They brought recently a new Sparc system and now a new Solaris but its clear this is a shrinking niche market for Oracle.

Remains the fact that Solaris is the superiour ZFS storage OS over Open-ZFS/ Illumos regarding performance and many features. The new release even increase the advantage with native ZFS encryption, sequential resilvering, dedup2, SMB3 and NFS 4.1 - none of them in current Illumos.

Even when Oracle freezes Solaris at its current state with only bugfixes and small improvements and this is what I expect it will last until Open-ZFS or the free Solaris forks can close the gap and overturn this. For sure this will happen as its there where many former Sun/Oracle ZFS developers are now.
 

Evan

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But the forks would have to create the features from scratch right? The Solaris code isn’t open


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
The SMB and NFS code may be available open source ? But yeah the core ZFS I also assumed was closed source and not an easy way for openZFS to catch up, but if that’s the way it works the so be it, I would not expect these new ZFS features get Oracle/Sun one more new customer.

Somebody mentioned a new ZFS for MacOS and even Windows so there is certainly work happening on the openZFS but I assume that’s all being done based on the original 2010 CDDL source code as it’s been maintained and improved since then.
So everything since 2010 is case of let’s copy this feature, have to write it from scratch ?
 

gea

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OpenSolaris build 148 was OpenSource and this was forked by Illumos/ OpenIndiana in 2010. Oracle was only able to set newer improvents as closed source afterwards.

Since then development of Solaris and Illumos was completely seperate and some features like LZ4 compression were even earlier in Illumos than in Solaris.

The common Open-ZFS platform that was created then to coordinate further free ZFS development between BSD, Illumos, OSX and ZoL (eventually Windows in future) is now the place where the most ZFS inventions happen.
 

gigatexal

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Right. But they’ll (openZFS) will have to take features from closed Solaris and engineer it from scratch which is a bummer.

I wish it were open. Oracle could still command contracts and dinero from clients that have to by policy pay them but others like us could use an open version with all the cool features just not in production. Alas that’s not the case.

I’ll just have to settle for what comes about in openZFS


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

gea

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I would not expect that Oracle will open Solaris again. Even if its not a core business any longer they will earn money from it for many years to come. You only must look at the finance industry to see how long special equipment is in use.

But this is not a problem as the real development power is now in the Open-ZFS field. You can even expect critical ZFS features like vdev remove or single disk add to a raid-z vdev soon in Open-ZFS. ZFS Encryption is nearly ready and extremely awaited in the light of the new EU data security rules (eu dsgvo) as it demands state of the art security technology at the technical level what must mean encryption - with fines up to 4% of worldwide earnings - and the EU has already shown its power to enforce its rules.
 
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gea

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Update

napp-it is running from current release Feb 02 on Solaris 11.4b (not all functions tested)
If you want that the napp-it wget installer compiles ex smartmontools 6.6 you should
set the beta repository prior napp-it and install gcc (pkg install gcc-5)

You need to setup the beta repository. If you have defined it after a napp-it setup,
install storage services manually
pkg install --accept --deny-new-be storage/storage-server

Solaris 11.4 manuals
Oracle Solaris 11.4 Information Library
 
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