Oracle Releases Solaris 11.4 "CBE" Free For Open-Source Developers / Non-Production Use

[joni200]

Hm, we are still using Solaris 11.4 at work for running Oracle DBs on it. It's a dozen baremetal servers with some 60 or more Solaris kernel zones (VMs) running on them.

We have plans to migrate those DBs to Linux in the near future, but those plans are set back by some infrastructural changes not yet done.

[CommunityMember]

Solaris, at this point, is targeted mostly at the server space and not the desktop (even though I am sure there are a few diehards who would use it for a desktop). For the right use cases it is still a good server OS choice (Solaris has had a number of optimizations and accelerations for the Oracle DB, for example).

[tildearrow]

Solaris, at this point, is targeted mostly at the server space and not the desktop (even though I am sure there are a few diehards who would use it for a desktop). For the right use cases it is still a good server OS choice (Solaris has had a number of optimizations and accelerations for the Oracle DB, for example).

Even on servers I believe Solaris has been eclipsed by Linux and the BSDs.
The only reason for its existence is compatibility with existing software or infrastructure.

[evert_mouw]

OmniOS is a great replacement. Fast & easy to install. Boots up in seconds. The deep ZFS integration is nice to have. (Normally I use a RHEL clone for servers and Arch for desktops, but I've installed one OmniOS storage box.)

https://omnios.org/

Also: this is my first post here :-)

[CommunityMember]

Even on servers I believe Solaris has been eclipsed by Linux and the BSDs.

I have not done the cost calculations recently, but not when you include the Oracle DB and middleware licensing changes (the $/transaction is (was) much(!) better on Oracle hardware with Solaris).

Oracle licensing is, well, special.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

I hear they are offering a 3 million dollar incentive package to use the new Solaris.

Which means all three users get a million dollars!! Whoo hoo!!

You'd be surprised. Oracle made $798M on hardware last quarter, and some of that is still running Solaris. Hell, SPARC may still make up some surprising percentage of that. Big enterprise customers with software built and tuned for Solaris, with extremely long cycles to update that code for Linux. Dropping a million bucks on a hardware refresh that's still running Solaris is peanuts compared to the software rewrite costs (and time / risk), especially for those still running it on SPARC hardware. And since they aren't investing much in it, their margins are still decent even as the revenue for that segment continues to decline.

[kylew77]

Young fool, only now at the end do you understand that killing OpenSolaris was a bad idea! FreeBSD adopted ZFS, Linux adopted ZFS, Illumnos Gate powers dozens of OpenSolaris distros, no one wants or needs a closed source Solaris.

[wswartzendruber]

Go home, Oracle. You're drunk.

[Delgarde]

I have not done the cost calculations recently, but not when you include the Oracle DB and middleware licensing changes (the $/transaction is (was) much(!) better on Oracle hardware with Solaris).

Oracle licensing is, well, special.

And even then, nobody wants to use Solaris. By day, I work on an enterprise system that's very invested in Oracle products — and pretty much all of our customers are moving to a Linux-only model, even those who have traditionally favoured Solaris/Sparq hardware. That hardware just doesn't fit nicely into a modern business where everything is either going cloud, or at least running VMs on local data centres.

[kpedersen]

I am somewhat of a Solaris fan (excluding Oracle) and am a little bit baffled by this "CBE" release. If you have no issue using a license encumbered version of Solaris 11 (which CBE is), then why not just use the standard Solaris 11 release from their website. It is freely downloadable.

Where Oracle tends to get you is with their packages (I suppose like RedHat Enterprise but more awkward) in that only the older release packages are available in the "free" repos meaning that once Solaris Studio (a fairly horrible IDE based on Netbeans) required a newer version of a dependency, it was very difficult to get this one resolved (without* buying* a* license*).

Looking at the CBE release, it is mostly the package repo that they are providing as the selling point but has the opposite problem. All the packages and dependencies there will tend to be "too new" as it is a rolling release and the Solaris ecosystem tends to be a bit more reserved.

I suppose this is by design...