Mark's blog

I've finally had the chance to devote some time to experimenting with some of the new features in Solaris 11. This article is really just intended as a walk-through of my first few weeks using Solaris 11 - a "kick of the tyres", so to speak. There is far too much that is new for me to cover everything, so I'll be adding to this article and updating this site as I go through it. I'm also assuming the reader is familiar with Solaris 10; if you feel some parts need clarification, or if I've skipped over something you'd particularly like covered, feel free to let me know!

I am a little unclear as to the new licensing restrictions around Solaris 11. My understanding (Caveat: I Am Not A Lawyer™) is that it is free to use for personal and non-commercial purposes, but anything after a 30-day trial period must be licensed if you intend to use it for any kind of commercial purposes - this includes development and testing environments. You also do not get access to patches or software updates without a support contract; sadly that now includes things like BIOS and firmware updates that used to be freely available in the Sun days. All part of the new regime, I suppose - we all have to get used to contributing to Larry's yacht fund now.

Heading on over to Oracle's online store reveals that a "Oracle Solaris Premier Subscription for Non-Oracle Hardware (1-4 socket server)" starts at £672.00, which does compare favourably with Red Hat Linux. Excluding the 2-socket tier, an equivalent 4-socket Red Hat license would set you back around £1,000 and only includes a license for 1 virtual machine. More details of what's included in the support offering are at http://www.oracle.com/us/support/systems/operating-systems/index.html.

Update : An anonymous reader provides some clarification - it looks like it may not be such a great deal after all : 

I would be interested to hear of any experiences of Oracle's support when using non-Oracle hardware, as to date (apart from some non-production environments running on HP ProLiant systems) everything I have run Solaris on has been a Sun/Oracle SPARC or x64 system, and the OS support was included under a larger company support contract. Update 2 : There's some experience of Solaris on HP kit in the comments below. 

Anyway, the first step is to download the software and unlike previous Solaris releases, there's now a variety of different installation media so you have to pick the correct one for your needs. The available downloads are :

• Text Install : This is very similar to the old Solaris text-mode installs (SPARC and x86) and even has the same colour-scheme and "F2_Continue" shortcuts down the bottom. Takes me right back to installing Solaris 8 on old Pentium systems!
  
  
• Automated Installer : This provides a "hands-free" network installation system, and replaces the old Jumpstart system. You need to have your own IPS repository (more on that later) set up, or have access to the Internet so you can reach Oracle's IPS repository.
  
  
• Live Media : This is only available for x86 systems, and is very similar to the Linux "live environments" on Ubuntu and Fedora etc. It lets you run the system off the CD and experiment with it before actually installing it. It's pretty slow and you'll need a lot of memory so I personally didn't find it of much use other than to check hardware compatibility and so on.
  
  
• Repository Image : Unlike previous Solaris releases, the installation media does not contain all available packages. Instead, it contains a smaller subset of software which will allow you to get a basic system up and running. After that, you need to connect to Oracle's pkg.oracle.com server to download other packages, or use this image to either setup a local IPS server on your network (or mount it and use it as a local repository).
  
  
• USB Install Images : Again, only available for x86. I didn't test this out as I didn't have a need for it, but it would be a useful addition to the Solaris Sysadmin's toolbox.
  
  
• Virtual Machine Downloads : These are VM images that can be imported directly into a variety of hypervisors - could be useful for getting started quickly, but most admins will either be using the text or automated installers.

There's also a "Oracle Solaris 11 Preflight Application Checker" available, which checks an application running on Solaris 10 and indicates whether it should run without problems on Solaris 11. However, given the Solaris binary compatibility guarantee it's unlikely you'd encounter problems. In any case, you could always run a Solaris 10-branded zone under Solaris 11 - indeed, creating a Solaris 10 zone from a running system (using flash images) is a supported configuration and process.

I grabbed the x86 text installation images and installed a system using Oracle Virtualbox. As with Solaris 10, the boot menu (grub) lets you choose an install over a local terminal or serial ports. The latter option is particularly useful in an environment using Sun/Oracle servers without a graphics card - while you can use iLOM/ALOM, going straight to the serial port is much faster.

The setup starts off much the same as Solaris 7 onwards, with the usual region/keyboard selection, and then you get presented with a new menu :

1 Install Oracle Solaris
2 Install Additional Drivers
3 Shell
4 Terminal Type (currently sun-color)
5 Reboot

Choosing option 3 (Shell) drops you into a basic rescue-like environment, and typing "exit" (or hitting Ctrl-D) at any point returns you to menu. This environment is extremely useful for performing emergency maintenence or recover tasks and while you could always use "boot -s" from older Solaris installation media, it's is a very welcome addition to have it so easily available. In this shell environment "svcadm enable ssh" starts a SSH server, and if you create a new user (you can't login as root), you can also login over network.

The next screen that has noticably changed is the disks screen. UFS has been completely removed as an option, so instead of choosing your slices for filesystems, you now only get to pick which slice whould be used for the ZFS root pool. It is recommended that you use the entire disk/LUN where possible, as this lets ZFS make much better use of the underlying volume (see http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide for more information).

There is no choice as to ZFS filesystem layout, although as it can so easily be modified it really doesn't matter. Whatever slice or LUN you select is assigned to the "rpool" volume.

After the network configuration (which has changed slightly but still provides the same choices of "DHCP, Manually or None"), you reach the User creation step. This again is noticably different: Firstly, it now enforces password complexity. Secondly, you have to create a new user account as well. The traditional root account is now a role, and you can't login directly as root. Like most Linux distros, the first user account created has the ability to use sudo/RBAC to work as root when needed. 

After this step, the installation starts in earnest. The install is very quick, and after the slow initial reboot (when it loads smf service descriptions), you can login.