Complexity removed, power added.

www.c0t0d0s0.org has an interesting entry what will be after Linux.

I found the first comment the most interesting, The Linux croud are still trying to say that Solaris is great for big servers. Of course that has been the ralying cry for the Linux crowd since the beginning of time, but Solaris 10 now has lots of technology that makes it better for smaller systems especially the home user, which I will get to in a moment. Yes linux has lots of features that are common on UNIX and enterprise class stuff, LVM (Logical Volume Manager), Systemtap, EXT4, NFSv4, iscsi, network Bonding where it is faling down on the job is making stuff easier to use.

Solaris started out on the big hardware and yes it was terrible to use, but if you know it and understand how it fits together it pays well. Now with Solaris 10 they are adding things that make all the peices fit together without a soldering iron and a manual bit flipper. For instance:

ZFS gives all the functionality of Linux's LVM, and a state of the art filesystem, all with a simple user interface just two commands allow you to do nearly everything in ZFS. I won't bore you but here is how you create a raidz pool, and create an iscsi shared volume, a smb shared filesystem, and a nfs shared filesystem take a snapshot of every filesystem and volume just created, no cryptic commands, its all thought out well and allows the administrator to start simple and move from one network file system to all others with a shallow learning curve, no work has been done in Linux to make the parts fit together as they have been done in Solaris nine commands did all this work, I know I could of did it in less but I didn't use the short cuts. Any one want to admit to how many it would be in Linux?

zpool pool raidz drive1 drive2 drive3 drive4
zfs set compression=on pool
zfs create pool/smbshared
zfs set sharesmb=name=shared pool/smbshared
zfs create -V 10g pool/iscsivol
zfs set shareiscsi=on pool/iscsivol
zfs create pool/nfsshare
zfs set sharenfs=on  pool/nfsshare
zfs snapshot -r pool@snapshot

Solaris 10 also has Zones, that are like Freebsd jails on steroids, and are multiple generations beyond the chroot that Linux tradionally uses, I've heard that zoning type solutions are in planning but they have not been intergrated into any of the main stream Linux distrobution. So the user is faced with reinventing the wheel for each program they want to include in a chroot and its much more complex like documented at Chroot BIND Howto in Solaris 10 and beyond you just create a small zone config using a well documented process that adds a layer of seperation of not just the filesystems, but network, and read-only mounted copies of the files.

# zonecfg -z z1
z1: No such zone configured
Use 'create' to begin configuring a new zone.
zonecfg:z1> create
zonecfg:z1> set zonepath=/export/z1
zonecfg:z1> set autoboot=true
zonecfg:z1> add net
zonecfg:z1:net> set address=192.168.1.10
zonecfg:z1:net> set physical=hme0
zonecfg:z1:net> end
zonecfg:z1> verify
zonecfg:z1> commit
zonecfg:z1>exit

and then create the zones, using zoneadm -z z1 install, no knowledge of what particular program you are encapsulating, so you can create zones for each service (.i.e. Apache, MySQL, bind) without a full day of researching each service and of this is done with just 2 commands, zonecfg and zoneadm.

Solaris is now simplifying network administration in the "clearview" project. In the past Solaris Networking configuration has been ugly to say the least, to enable large packets you had to edit different drive configuration files based on which Network interface card you had. Trunking and teaming required special drivers and programs to be installed and worked on a limited number of cards. Now Solaris 10 has merged all the bits into one place, dladm is a new control program that allows you to do all this in a unified way. Including network tunneling, aggregation, vanity naming and more. Recently the next generation to networking in Solaris was released its called crossbow which adds network vitalization to Solaris, you can create virtual switches and divide physical nics into chunks and they do it using the dladm introduced for crossview. You can do some of this with Linux but its not easy, and each project seems to reinvent the wheel. Xen offers the virtual switches, the advanced router howto shows how to limit network bandwidth. Solaris gives it all a unified interface.

Now all this new functionality has been added into Solaris 10 with just 5 commands. While this is pretty amazing, its just the first step, I guess you are surprised that I say its just the first step. The real power becomes when you tie these technologies together. You can use ZFS filesystem snapshots and clones to make zone creation faster and use less space and yes is just as simple, and the crossbow and clearview are integrated into zones as well. I won't try and show all this as its all ready done at Crossbow Hands on.

All of integration just isn't limited to these projects, DTrace has it as well, you can tell dtrace you are only want to watch stuff from a specific zone. DTrace has a network provider set of probes that allow you to watch events related to networking including ipf (the firewall), ipv6, and because Solaris uses a smart frame work these probes usually work on new features as well.