zones

Sun Oracle Webcast Wrap Up

Last night I watched almost the entire 5 hour live webcast announcing Oracle's strategies regarding the Sun Microsystems acquisition. As a near-evangelist for Sun and Solaris, I'm very happy with the deal finally going through and even happier that most of what Oracle said makes sense to me as a customer.

Sun's Predicament

I've been working with Unix for a fairly long time now- about 13 years.

I'll admit that I started with Linux and thought it was light years ahead of SunOS 4.x running on those old SPARC machines- I mean who had heard of SPARC processors? I remember my boss trying to explain to me that even an older SPARC processor was more powerful than a newer Intel Pentium processor. I didn't really believe him. In time, I convinced them to get rid of most of their SPARC/Solaris in favor of the hip, free, and cheap Intel/Linux combination.

Now I see that I couldn't have been more wrong. I realize that SunOS 4.x probably still has features which I don't know how to use properly. When I look at Solaris 10, ZFS, Zones, LDOMS, DTrace, etc. I not really sure you could pay me to work with Linux (that would be soo depressing). That isn't even mentioning the SPARC hardware it runs on- Can any Intel server compare to a T5140???

Cloning zones in Solaris 10 6/06

I googled for "Cloning Solaris Zones" and found lots of documentation on the zoneadm clone feature. I started to follow the howtos and hit a brick wall... my zoneadm doesn't know how to clone. Deeper digging shows that the documentation on Sun's site was for Solaris Express- Sun's bleeding edge version of OpenSolaris- Can I say "How useless!"