Eric Bruno is a contributing editor to Dr. Dobb's Journal. He can be contacted at www.ericbruno.com.
As part of its 8/07 update release of Solaris 10, Sun Microsystems has announced updates to Solaris 10 in three main areas: virtualization, networking, and the database tier. This release runs on more than 900 AMD, Intel, and SPARC-based systems -- including those sold by Sun, IBM, Dell, and HP.
Virtualization
Enterprises are constantly working to consolidate functionality and servers in order to reduce power, cooling, and management costs. Have you seen the value of VMWare's stock these days? The reason is virtualization is a solution to the consolidation problem. This technique lets you run more than one virtual server, each with its own set of dedicated processes, on one physical server. This solution is an excellent way to take advantage, fully, of the latest in multi-core hardware. Reducing the need for more physical servers helps to lower datacenter power and cooling costs
With this update, Sun has enhanced the virtualization support in Solaris 10. Areas such as total application environment support and the ability to observe and monitor applications in virtualized environments have been boosted. Solaris containers have been extended into the Linux space. You can now run native Linux applications within a Solaris container, with the entire application environment virtualized as well. As a result, the application's full environment will migrate easily from an existing Linux installation. For the most part, the application will deploy, execute, and behave as though it were running on a native Linux server.
This virtualization comes with low additional overhead, allowing you to run dozens (or perhaps hundreds) of containers with virtualized environments without an issue. You have the ability to cap memory usage, CPU usage, and to even dedicate sets of CPUs on a container-by-container basis, yielding deterministic results in a shared environment.
Solaris 10's container management features have been upgraded also. Individual containers can be upgraded, live, without the need to take the container offline.
Networking
The Solaris 10 8/07 update contains significant enhancements to the network stack. These enhancements include the improved ability to observe network performance on an application and container basis. Related to the virtualization enhancements, you can now create a separate IP stack per container to further segregate application network traffic. Further, each container's IP stack can be allocated to use only a percentage of the overall server's network capacity, allowing you to control traffic on a container-by-container basis.
This new networking architecture is the foundation of Crossbow, which is a future Solaris network virtualization technology and resource control for Solaris where even individual applications (within a single container) can be allocated and guaranteed a percentage of overall server network capacity.
Also new in this release is support for DHCP version 6, and support for transport large segment offload (LSO) processing with hardware acceleration. This feature is useful for bulk database data loads, for example, and results in a reduction in associated CPU load.
Database Tier
Solaris has a legacy of superb enterprise application and database support. This update furthers that support with built-in features to help organizations deploy and manage Apache Derby (also JavaDB), MySQL, and PostgreSQL 2.0 databases. In particular, Sun worked with MySQL to provide a versionthat's specifically optimized for Solaris 10.
PostgreSQL 2.0 is often used for large-scale enterprise database applications. It, too, has been optimized for the Solaris 10 OS. In particular, many new DTrace probe points have been added, and it's now contained within and integrated with the OS.
Perhaps the most impressive database feature is the PostgreSQL /Solaris price-performance benchmark. In general, Sun has achieved a 2x price-performance value for the PostgreSQL /Solaris/Glassfish combination over Oracle running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Keep in mind that this value takes into consideration the results of the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark and price (jAppServer2004 is a multi-tier benchmark for measuring the performance of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology-based application servers.) When just performance is measured, Oracle/RHEL edges PostGres/Solaris with SPECjAppServer2004 scores of approximately 1100 and approximately 800, respectively. When the price of the applications is added to the equation, the advantage tips significantly in Sun's favor. You can read more about this benchmark comparison at Sun's On The Record site.
The Future of Solaris
Sun's continues support for the community of over 9.3 million Solaris licensees demonstrates Solaris' continued growth in the enterprise. To understand Solaris' growth outside of the enterprise, and onto the desktop, you need to follow the developments in the OpenSolaris community and with Project Indiana -- a project on top of OpenSolaris to provide simplified distribution and installation of the OpenSolaris OS. As the community grows, and with it, downloads of OpenSolaris, the future looks bright for Solaris over all.
