No more hiding in the server room

I want to learn OpenSolaris

I really do. Only in part because someone told me that it would melt my brain. I take stuff like that personally.

Anyway, if I get some time in the next few months, I want to get started learning it. I also want to drink some of the ZFS kool-aid and see what that's all about.

What I need are suggestions from you Solaris people. Yes, the knee-jerk response "just install it and play" is going to happen, but I want to run up the learning curve, so I'm looking for other resources that I can look into. What do you suggest? Is there a book that explains the Solaris "mindset"?

My background at this point is something like 12+ years in Linux, the first 9 of which were Slackware (the most BSD-like of the Linuxes), so I might be 'handicapped'.

What do you think?

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Permalink Reply by Isaac on June 9, 2009 at 8:43pm

I moved our company over to Solaris from Linux a few years ago. At the time I was much more experienced with Linux then Solaris. Inttially it was a bit disorrenting but I got the hang of things fairly quickly. After all Linux and Solaris are both nix-es it’s not like going from Windows to Debian.

I’m not aware of a book that explains the Solaris “mindset” but I have the OpenSolaris Bible and it’s pretty good as an introduction and reference to OpenSolaris and some of the other software in the Solaris eco-system.

Your comment about mindset is pretty accurate … it is different then Linux. Solaris is very “Cathedral” style vs. the bazaar of Linux. That applies to the development model of Solaris of course, there’s really not a Linux equivalent to the OpenSolaris ARC for instance, but I’ve meet many Solaris admins like that as well. It’s more .. umm … controlled, based around establishing polices and procedures. That works great if you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of production servers but can be a big pain if you’re only talking about a handful. OpenSolaris, as opposed to regular Solaris, has taken big steps in being straightforward for smaller networks as well as streamlining administration for sysadmins.

This mindset has its ups and downs. Heavyweight bureaucracy aside, the up side is that there’s a big picture design of the whole OS going on that I find lacking in Linux. As an example ZFS (which is absolutely as good as you’ve heard) would never never have come out of the Linux world. Its very telling that some Linux kernel devs stated that ZFS was badly designed because it “broke layering” while, IMHO, missing the bigger picture.

I also find that Solaris has tools better support running production servers. For instance Live Upgrade gives us a very good contingency option if patching or upgrading fails, weather it’s a 3rd party app or the OS proper that causing issues. Dtrace gives us on demand deep visibility into the system without impacting performance or reconfiguring/restarting applications. RBAC allows us give fine grained permissions and it’s integrated in the OS as opposed to being just in userspace like sudo.

Please note that I’m not trying to say that one model is better then another but that they’re different. All this said, of course, the actual end users vary. It’s a stereotype that Linux admins are cowboys and it’s a stereotype that Solaris admins are bureaucratic dictators. You can find people that fit that but you can find plenty that don’t.

Sorry about the wall of text … this rambled on a bit more then I had intended.

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Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on June 9, 2009 at 8:58pm

Don't apologize about the length, this was a great post! That's a very insightful look at a complex topic. I appreciate you sharing that, and it really does help me a lot. I'm going to have to add the OpenSolaris Bible to my O'Reilly bookshelf. Thanks again!

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Permalink Reply by Julian Regel on June 11, 2009 at 1:00pm

With 12+ years Linux experience, you'll have no problems, as long as you understand that OpenSolaris is not Linux and that some things will be different. Set your expectations appropriately and you'll enjoy the ride.

I've been a Solaris admin for the last 10 years, and a Linux admin for roughly the same amount of time. Solaris seems "tidier" to me than Linux, certainly as a server, but for the desktop, I'd prefer a Linux environment.

Things to look at:

Solaris Containers: This is Zones virtualisation plus Resource Management. You can limit the number of processors, CPU time etc that a zone gets to stop it killing other zones. Zones are very lightweight and you can have hundreds of them on a single server.

ZFS: Volume manager and filesystem. It is as good as people say it is :-). Everyone mentions the snapshot ability - which is very cool - but don't neglect other features such as NFS and CIFS serving (using the not-Samba CIFS server), volume replication using "zfs send" and "zfs recv", volume compression, the ability to create ZVOLs (essentially a ZFS volume without the ZFS filesystem. You can use ZVOLs and publish them using iSCSI to other servers and still take advantage of the ZFS checksumming and fault tolerance).

FMA (Fault Management Architecture): Not sure how much you can "play" with this, but it's good to learn about. Basically identifies failing and faulting components and attempts to offline cleanly.

Dtrace: Low level tracing. Very useful if you need this sort of thing. I've not done much with it personally but it's got some good reviews.

RBAC: Role Based Access Control can be difficult to get your head around at first, but provides a much improved security model to sudo.

For some more advanced topics and more detail for experienced sysadmins, check out the (free) Lesser Known Solaris Features book: http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/lksfbook/lksf_book_alpha.pdf

I personally use OpenSolaris as my "storage server" at home, sharing NFS and CIFS to my other Linux and Windows PCs, as well as iSCSI volumes to my ESXi box and my Mac. More details on my blog if you are interested in this.