Old school unix admin Solaris 11 is here

 One more rusty blog from me.



Mighty Oracle said good bye to the following installation methods for Solaris 11.

1. Jump-start

2. Flar (Flash Archives)

3. Live-upgrade 

For Solaris 11,you have to use “Automated Installer(AI)” instead of Jump-start.In larger environment if you are going to use both Solaris 10 and Solaris 11,then you have to maintain both Jump-start(To install Solaris 10) and AI (To install Solaris 11) servers. 

You can perform Solaris 11 Live install on existing running Solaris 10 systems.I am not sure how this will be helpful to the customers.

 Ahhh! in my previous company, there used to be wonderful Unix admin named Paul Widmark and he had done web front end to jumpstart with flash archive.

I can't describe how respectful I was for his work in Unix automation. 

Now it will be challenge for all the post install automation stuff,as they  need a new framework. Hope it is easy. 

Now Oracle seem to change a lot of things like patching,jumpstart and always skeptical about Live-update anyway.

Now Zfs is the default file system, there is no way you can use good old ufs, Solaris Volume manager also dies with it as there is no need for volume management with zfs.

My earlier company resisted move to Solaris 11 due to high dependence of Sparse zones and not willing to use zfs as Sun unified storage(Fishworks) using Solaris 11/Sfs created problems. 

There are no free lunches anywhere, if a customer is dependent of a tech giant like Oracle they better be following the road map and adapt to the changing situations.

Sparse zones were good idea but they are dead now, it is better to go with focussed virtualization solutions like VMWARE or Xen rather than dependent on Oracle's half hearted offerings, don't know when oracle will pull the plug on the Ldom or whole root zones as it is not their core focus area.

I like Oracle's new approach,zfs has been adopted by even BSD variants,it takes away the need for expensive veritas volume manager.

Below is a link to the practical guidelines to Solaris 11 upgrade. 

http://www.unixarena.com/2013/07/how-to-migrateupgrade-solaris10-to.html

P.S: there is different kind of Solaris coming to India, Hyundai is launching it's SUV named Solaris. Steve Mcnealy ,this might be the saddest day of your life.