Solaris – Strengths on Server Hardware

Full disclaimer I'm currently working at Sun but I don't speak for them - all this info is freely available, but a bit difficult to find.

Solaris 10 while having been out a few years is now at update 7 - new features have gone into Solaris 10 from OpenSolaris and will almost certainly continue to do so, but at a slower pace than an OpenSolaris distribution.

The name OpenSolaris confusing refers to a few different things. There is the Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) - a binary distribution that comes out roughly every 2 weeks is created from the internal builds of a product called Nevada (aka Solaris 11). Shortly following the putbacks to Nevada/SXCE these then go back to the development build of OpenSolaris 2009.06 (aka Indiana) and that comes out every couple of weeks as well. If you want to run the latest and greatest bits you can do so by changing your OpenSolaris (indiana) repository.

The 2008.11 and 2009.06 6 monthly releases of OpenSolaris are almost entirely Open Source (nvidia graphics drivers being one of the notable exceptions) and are also supported, these are not BETA releases - you can buy a contract and will get any important fixes back ported to these releases through a paid for support repository. Security fixes will get back ported to OpenSolaris 2008.11 and 2009.06 (latest two releases) eventually and will be available without a contract to anybody.

Your choices are Solaris 10 update 7 or OpenSolaris 2009.06 the SXCE distribution has never been a supported OS and the only way to get fixes is to upgrade your entire OS. Personally I would recommend the 6 monthly releases of 2009.06 as a good starting point unless you have a need for very long term enterprise support (10+ years) for your environment. If your interested in scaling then it is worth noting that you can get OpenSolaris 2009.06 instances in Amazons EC2 cloud these days. All Sun Solaris distributions will run on most x86 and most SPARC hardware.

Check http://www.opensolaris.com/learn/faq/ if you haven't already.

If there was already a partition set up on the disk from another OS, it might have the wrong type of disk label. I've seen cases before where Solaris can't see a disk which is set up with an EFI label (say from a prior Linux installation). Using 'format -e' will cause it to ask you whether to switch to SMI. You can run the shell to issue this command within a single user Solaris media boot. If you do have this problem, switching to SMI and labelling the disk will allow the disk to be seen by the installer.

Other considerations: using the latest Solaris release (I think it is U7 now) so drivers are most current. Also check that the SATA cables have snug connections. I fought a server problem for some time before finding that swapped SATA cables made the second drive in a mirror stop going away.