1. The Solaris Family - OPENSOLARIS based operating systems
Developed by Sun with its initial release in 2008, based on Unix System 5, Release 4 with revolutionary
features like ZFS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS), Comstar (enterprise ready iSCSI and FC technology), Dtrace,
Crossbow virtual networking, virtualization with Zones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Zones), ZFS inte-
grated kernel based CIFS/SMB and NFS server among other features like ZFS boot mirrors, disk unique WWN
enumeration or fault management service with auto hotspare support.
If you want to follow the way from Sun OpenSolaris to the free forks like the current Illumos based
distributions, you should look at Bryan Cantrills (Joyent) slideshow at
http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/fork-yeah-the-rise-and-development-of-illumos or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
Some essentials from the slideshow:
„In the mid-1990 it becomes a foregone conclusion that UNIX would die at the hands of Windows NT Hard to
believe, but SUN seems the only computer vendor whose Windows NT strategy was to beat Windows NT
Sun‘s dedication to this vision - the operating system as a nexus of innovation - attracted an entire new
generation of engineers to the company Development started on more radical ideas, each of it would become
revolutionary in its own right (ZFS, DTrace, Zones, Crossbow, Comstar, Fault Management, Service Manag-
ment, Least Privilege) These were technologies invented and initiated by engineers, not managers or marke-
ters These projects reflected the people behind them..Organizations don‘t innovate - people do
As the rise of Linux forced the market price of OS aquisition to zero, that open sourcing the (Solaris) operating
system was the right business decision (in 2005. Unfortunately, not all elements of the OS could be open-
sourced, some contracts prevented some small but important bits from beeing opensourced. To allow such
proprietary drivers, Sun developed a file based copy left licence (CDDL) ... this was not done to deliberatly GPL
incompatible!
Ailing Sun was bought by Oracle in 2009. Over 2010, it becomes clear that Oracle had obsolutely no interest
in OpenSolaris... There was.. a move to close the system (OpenSolaris)
Starting in the summer of 2010, Garett D‘Amore at Nexenta - with the help of Rich Lowe, Jason King and
others - began the process of ether writing the closed bits from scratch or porting from BSD. Dubbed „Illumos“
(from illuminare, Latin for illuminate) and made available on August 3, 2010
Illumos was not designed to be a fork, but rather an entirely open downstream repository of
OpenSolaris
Solaris 11 was released on November 9, 2011 - and there was no source release
The entire DTrace team, all primary ZFS inventors and primary engineers for zones and networking had left
Oracle.. nearly all of these engineers went to companies betting on Illumos.
In Illumos, we have seen critical innovations and bug fixes in ZFS, DTrace, Zones and other core technologies.
These innovations ill never be in Oracle Solaris. Joyent team ported KVM from Linux. Illumos distributions
SmartOS and OpenIndiana have KVM support by default.“
Solarish
If we talk about common features of Oracle Solaris and the free Solaris fork Illumos (ex OmniOS, OpenIndiana,
SmartOS) the term Solarish is common.
Summary of Contents for ZFS Storage
Page 8: ...3 1 ZFS Configurations...
