This presentation gives an overview of some of the new features included in Oracle Solaris 11.1 and why you should consider it as a deployment platform for Oracle database, middleware and applications, other 3 rd party enterprise applications, and the foundation for cloud solutions – whether it’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, or Software-as-a-Service.
On November 9, 2011 Oracle released Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 – the first fully virtualized operating system and the foundation for mission critical cloud infrastructure deployments.
Best UNIX for Oracle Deployments Optimized for Oracle software and hardware Delivering the performance you need in an Optimized Datacenter Built for Cloud Infrastructures Breakthrough architecture to deploy and secure and manage enterprise clouds Delivering the simplicity you need in an Optimized Datacenter #1 UNIX for Enterprise Applications Industry leading availability, security and performance for enterprise applications Investment protection for enterprise environments Reducing risk in your Optimized Datacenter with over 25 years of enterprise experience Oracle Solaris 11 is the latest release of the #1 UNIX enterprise operating system. Building on two decades of innovation and leadership in the data center, Oracle Solaris 11 introduces a host of new features to provide a mature and reliable mission critical platform for application deployment. The features in Oracle Solaris 11 can be summarized over 3 different areas: Providing a platform that is ideal for cloud type environments Whether it’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or software as a service (SaaS), Oracle Solaris provides a highly reliable, flexible and agile platform for the cloud. We’ve focused on providing technology making it easier to deploy, easier to manage, and easier to observe. In many senses, Oracle Solaris had cloud technologies well before ‘cloud’ was a common theme in enterprise computing, and with the rest of Oracle’s software and hardware stack, we believe we can provide a very compelling platform. Being the best UNIX for Oracle software deployments Ever since the Sun Microsystems acquisition we’ve been working hard with other product groups at Oracle, making sure that we optimize the entire stack, from hardware right through the different virtualization and software layers – database, middleware, and applications – to deliver the best possible performance and reliability. This full stack approach gives us unique value in providing a well tested, integrated and high performance solution . Being the best UNIX for all other enterprise applications Despite a lot of focus on Oracle on Oracle, we’re still striving to be the best UNIX for your enterprise applications – our bread and butter, if you will. Solaris has had a long history in the data center as providing a very stable, very secure, and high performing platform. We’re continuing to do that with Oracle Solaris 11, continuing to guarantee your business investment through binary compatibility, and focusing on allowing you to focus on your business, not on trying to keep your infrastructure online.
With Oracle Solaris 10, we raised the bar in terms of the innovation included in the operating system. Oracle Solaris is a trusted platform for enterprise deployments among our customer base for providing a highly available and mission critical foundation that they can rely on. Larry Ellison has often said “If it must work, it runs on Solaris”. With features such as our predictive self healing capability (through the Service Management Facility and Fault Management Architecture ) we can continue to run in the event of any software and hardware failures either by restarting services, or isolating hardware components until they can be replaced some time later. ZFS , the next generation file system, provides us tremendous scale and data integrity when managing the high volumes of data in today’s computing industry. Built in data services like snapshot and cloning, encryption, RAID and others mean that customers no longer need to purchase additional expensive software to secure their data. With Oracle Solaris Cluster , customers could benefit from the unique integration with the fastest levels of fail over for application clustering. Through technologies like Oracle Solaris auditing and Role Based Authentication Control , customers could ensure they met compliance requirements while having unprecedented observability of live production systems through the DTrace dynamic tracing framework in a safe way. Oracle Solaris 11 brings all of the attributes of a mission critical enterprise operating system together but with a focus on also being an agile and flexible environment for cloud computing at a large scale. With built-in server, storage and network virtualization , no other operating system provides the complete virtualized solution to deal with the demands of cloud computing in a scalable way. We’ve done a lot of work to ensure we can provision the operating system quickly and consistency, and manage it for the complete lifecycle in a fail safe environment. One of the technology foundations of this approach is Oracle Solaris Zones , which provide OS virtualization at extremely low overhead – the perfect vehicle in deploying applications within a multi-tenant cloud environment.
With Oracle Solaris 11 Oracle set out to simplify life cycle management in the datacenter. Old, ad hoc provisioning required days and weeks of careful planning to patch and updates systems. With Oracle Solaris 11 you can now create custom distributions specific to your environment and use our Automated Installer tools to rapidly install hundreds of systems. Virtualization has introduced VM sprawl as users use multiple VMs to develop, test and eventually deploy their applications. Oracle Solaris 11 Zones can be quickly created for developers to create new services and applications. That same zone can then be cloned and services tested thanks to the capabilities of the ZFS file system. Finally as the new application or services is ready to deploy it’s a simple matter of creating multiple clones of the tested environment and the service or application can be in service in several zones. To reduce risk and simplify system software updates a new technique, Oracle Solaris Boot Environments , were introduced in Oracle Solaris 11. Boot environments are ZFS snapshots of the system files that are cloned to create a duplicate boot environment. The new boot environment is then updated offline with the latest software packages. Because ZFS snapshots are very low overhead, the new boot environment is small and fast to boot. When you are ready to update the system you simply boot the new boot environment. If for some reason you aren’t happy with the new environment you can return to the older boot environment without having to back out patches or rebuild the system. This intersection of Oracle Solaris technologies – ZFS and IPS – create new capabilities that deliver important business value. Boot environments are also tightly integrated with Oracle Solaris Zones to make the updating of zones simple and fast.
TIf you take a look at the typical administrative tasks to apply a new security fix, IPS means that can apply these fixes in a fully fail-safe way , thanks to built in package dependency and integrity checking. In actual fact, these security fixes can be applied on live production systems well in advanced of a planned maintenance window. Once the update is run, a new boot environment will be created. IPS will check what packages needed to be updated and apply these into a separate cloned environment . Once the maintenance window arrives, the system administrator can simply reboot the system. For a typical security patch, this can take as little as 4 minutes, though times may vary depending on size of systems to boot. With Oracle Solaris 11, we’ve also introduced the capability of fast reboot for SPARC and x86 systems which help to get the new environment back online quickly. This fast reboot avoids often slow BIOS checks that don’t always need to be run. With ZFS boot environments, and administrator can quickly revert into an older boot environment if anything goes wrong during the update, or it has an unexpected impact on running applications.
While customers could have placed zones in shared storage (SAN) themselves the configuration is tricky and the various steps are all left to the customer. This resulted in differing implementations, and often customers were not taking advantage of ZFS as their backend storage file system. With Oracle Solaris Zones on Shared Storage , we reduce the complexity of this commonly asked functionality, so customers can easily leverage their backend storage environment. This has become more important now as customers look for mobility of their virtualization. With Oracle Solaris Zones on shared storage the move becomes the time to shutdown/detach/attach/boot the zone – this can be a very fast operation depending on the applications within the zone. Note: Zones on NFS are still not supported.
And finally, let’s take a look at Oracle Solaris 11 in action at some of our customer sites.
While Oracle itself is a very significant independent software vendor, many other 3 rd party ISVs are already providing certification for their applications on the Oracle Solaris 11 platform. We’re already seeing increased adoption here and expect this to continue. If you have an application that you rely on that’s uncertified for Oracle Solaris 11, please get in touch with our ISV engineering team so that we can schedule someone to have a talk with them and provide support for getting their application migrated to Oracle Solaris 11.
If you look at where Oracle Solaris has come from you’ll see over 25 years of enterprise experience, innovation, and leadership. Oracle Solaris is the most deployed UNIX server , and 10,000s of customers put their faith in the platform to run mission critical applications reliably and securely, with the highest levels of scalability and performance. Oracle Solaris is a leader when it comes to performance with a number of world record benchmarks to its name. Oracle is continuing it’s investment in the operating system and providing innovation into the data center.
The Top 11 reasons why Customers are investing in SPARC/Solaris from Oracle Best Reliability – a hallmark of Sun Systems for years and it continues – if it must run, it runs on SPARC/Solaris Performance Results – emphasize real-world workloads, not esoteric SPEC results Engineering for Tomorrow’s Systems – 10Ks of threads, 100GB of memory, Zettabytes of data 20+ years of hard core integrated security features – unique zones-based multi-level, labeled security configuration Fully virtualized OS – server, storage, network – optimizes use of datacenter resources. Quickly deploy new services to grow your business. Co-engineering – we co-engineer Solaris, Oracle software and Oracle hardware to deliver the best performance for Oracle deployments. Engineered systems cut deployment times down dramatically. We engineer so you don’t have to. No other OS runs on the leading RISC and CISC architecture – choose the best platform for your datacenter (we recommend Oracle Solaris on SPARC) More applications than any other UNIX vendor – Oracle Solaris 10 boasts more than 11K apps. IBM boasts of 2200 apps. Many of these applications will continue to run on Oracle Solaris 10 Zones running on top of Oracle Solaris 11 Oracle Solaris engineers design complexity out – check out ZFS and it’s simplified storage and file system setup. Zones automatically provision network stacks. FMA and SMF self manage a system to keep it available…. Oracle guarantees HW and SW binary compatibility – apps running today and on legacy systems move to newer SPARC/Solaris unmodified, saving dollars in migration costs Oracle’s integrated stack – avoidance of a piecemeal approach and reduction of complicated support efforts with mixed environments. The only vendor in the industry with all the pieces in the stack to offer and deliver real value for application solutions
The proliferation of virtualized servers in the last few years has made virtualization of the supporting networks absolutely essential, connecting those individual compute notes through to the backend storage. With Oracle, the complexity of delivering compute, network and storage resources has been reduced allowing these to be dynamically allocated and re-allocated on demand. Oracle’s latest acquisition, Xsigo Systems , provides software defined networking technology to simplify cloud infrastructure, allowing customers to dynamically and flexibly connect any server to any network and storage as part of a single data center network fabric. This greatly reduces the complexity and cost of several layers of switches, server cards and cables. Combined with Oracle Solaris 11 and the ZFS Storage Appliance , only Oracle can provide high performance end-to-end cloud solution with extreme agility and security.