This article, Transition to AIX from Solaris is all about moving away from Solaris to the AIX System p environment, which may sound like completely the wrong topic for here.
In fact, the article contains a few interesting notes about zones and containers, and is a pretty good comparison of the main features of the two systems.
Inspired by a recent discussion on Xen Discuss about what different virtualization solutions were available from Sun I thought I’d take the information provided by Volker A. Brandt and Bernd Schemmer and put it into a convenient table.
| Name | Sparc | x86 | Method | OS Kernel | Guest OS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| xVM | - | X | software(1) | many | various |
| VirtualBox | - | X | software | many | various |
| Containers/Zones | X | X | software | one | Solaris/branded |
| LDOMs | X | - | hardware | many | Solaris(2) |
| Domains (Mx000 series) | X | - | hardware | many | Solaris |
| Domains (E10K, SF##K series, v1280, v4800) | X | - | hardware | many | Solaris, Linux |
Footnotes
(1) with CPU assistance for “full” virtualisation
(2) experimental Linux/BSD (?) support
Actually, Sun have a pretty good summary, but some of the technologies are hidden behind the hardware on which they run, for example LDOM is a firmware-level solution built into many of the SPARC hardware solutions.
While looking for some information on OpenSolaris in preparation for my talk this week I came across some excellent material providing backgrounds on OpenSolaris for both instructors and students.
The material is part of the Curriculum Development Resources at OpenSolaris.org and is available as PDFs for download. The documents are short and easy to read, but packed with lots of useful information and a good read for anybody interested in understanding more about the technology and functionality in OpenSolaris.
Not exactly portable (unless you have a container lorry or ship handy), but I’d love to have one of Sun’s Sun’s Modular Datacenters available to use.
The Modular Datacenter (otherwise known as Project Blackbox) squeezes 7 or 8 racks, depending on the the configuration fits 240 or 280 Us of rackspace into a standard shipping container. The idea is that you can deploy one of these containers very quickly with your desired set up, either to handle all of your datacenter requirements (which it could), or it’s used as a quick solution for a particular project.
Interestingly, I can also see it as a potential solution for cloud computing. Not only would a one of these containers make an excellent datacenter in it’s own right, but the ability to quickly expand the capacity when you need kinda takes the idea of cloud computing and easily expanded capacity to another level.
Sun are not the only people doing these datacenters in a container though:
All of them promote the density and power of the systems and, more importantly in todays climate, their energy efficiency.
In an ideal world we’d line these all up next to each other and compare them, but I hardly think that would be practical. It would, however, be interesting to see what sort of power, performance and flexibility these systems offered.
As Solaris gets more and more popular I’m seeing more and more people running Solaris on a laptop as their primary operating system. I’ve even got friends who have migrated over completely to Solaris from Linux. I’ve been using it for years and managed to tolerate some of the problems we had in the early days, but today it works brilliantly on many machines.
I came across this article on BigAdmin, it’s old, but a lot of the information is still perfectly valid.