Monday, November 15, 2010

Oracle Solaris Express 2010.11

A little summary of what you can expect the first release of Solaris 11, Solaris 11 Express 2010.11.

There is nothing drastically different from OpenSolaris, Solaris 11 Express is a rebranded later build with fixed bugs and new features, the build is snv_151a. A result of this is that it is possible to upgrade from OpenSolaris to Solaris 11 Express, there is a chapter about that in the release notes here.

The list of new features is long, personally I most look forward to features in ZFS such as crypto, zones integration with crossbow and the new network administration model with ipadm. For my laptop and desktops the upgraded Xorg and Gnome will be most welcome.

The text based installer is now available for both x86 and SPARC, it is something that has been obviously missing for server installations since the first release of OpenSolaris ( there have been previews ).

A long list I put together of new features, drivers etc between the last publicly available build of OpenSolaris (134) to build 146 it makes a nice overview of all the changes that have happened since the almost released 2010.0[23456].
Lots of enhancements, no build available

As I wrote in my last post Solaris 11 Express is already available for download and it is a Oracle supported release:

"Oracle Solaris 11 Express is fully tested and supported on a variety of SPARC and x86-based systems from Oracle, including the Exadata Database machine and Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and other hardware platforms from 3rd party vendors."

I am missing a way of using Solaris 11 Express for personal, non-profit or even startup companies without buying a license agreement. This is most true for people who want to give the Solaris 11 a try but might want to put anything from a personal web-server to the family albums on the same host. The license agreement says you are allowed to use it for the following:

"only for the purpose of developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating your applications, and not for any other purpose."

Oracle will host a live Solaris 11 Express webcast on the 7th of December here.

A few earlier posts on Solaris 11 Express:
Solaris 11 Express 2010.11 and ZFS
ZFS crypto integrated

The Oracle Solaris 11 Express Overview with link to Downloads and everything you need to get started: Oracle Solaris 11 Express

4 comments:

kworr said...

The licence seems to be interesting:

"We may audit your use of the Programs."

Like.. how? This means we are watched?

"You may not: disclose results of any benchmark test results related to the Programs without our prior consent."

Strange... would that one cover ZFS too? And ZFS in other OS'es? So should I notify Oracle when I want to test ZFS on FreeBSD?

Peter Theobald said...

Finally!
I'm looking forward to testing this out. I work with legal data, and ZFS doesn't have a good way to completely purge selected data from the filesystem including from unallocated space. Keeping each case in a separate encrypted filesystem will allow me to purge an expired case completely.

I'm keeping a list of all the different distros that support ZFS:

http://petertheobald.blogspot.com

Henkis said...

kworr: I also have problems with the license, but I think you can still benchmark ZFS in other binary builds since it's covered by CCDL.

Peter: Yes, I have also eagerly been awaiting crypto for years, maybe now we will even se BP-rewrite one day ;)

Good list BTW, but why are S11 Express not for production use? I would argue that this is of the more stable platforms for ZFS besides S10?

Peter Theobald said...

@Henkis, sorry maybe that was poor wording. I was referring to the license that forbids using Solaris 11 in a production environment.