Wednesday January 05, 2005 ServerWatch mistaken about Solaris on x86/AMD64?
As my colleague, Jim Grisanzio, points out about this article, there are some errors or typos about Solaris only being able to install to a drive with no other operating systems on it:
ServerWatch wrote:
"One blaringly obvious drawback, is that Solaris 10 cannot coexist on the same physical drive as another operating system. Thus, admins who wish to dabble in Solaris before deploying it will have to dedicate an entire physical hard drive to the adventure."
This is not true. It is true that you can only have a single instance of Solaris on x86/AMD64 per drive, but it is not limited to being the only system loaded to the drive by any means. Many people setup systems with dual, triple, even four or more systems to a single drive with Solaris on x86/AMD64 being one of them. And many do it today on Athlon64 systems where Solaris on x86/AMD64 runs in 64-bit.
Solaris on x86/AMD64 needs at least one primary partition. This is also true for some other systems as well though, so Solaris on x86/AMD64 is not unique in this regard. It is possible to load more than one instance of Solaris on x86/AMD64 to a single drive, but it requires changing partition types when you do so, so that Solaris on x86/AMD64 will not be confused. It is also possible to do similar with 3rd party boot managers, some of which will do this for you transparently.
There is a new boot architecture which is being worked on, and it will ship in an update to Solaris 10 for x86/AMD64. When this happens, most all of the limitations will be removed. Since Solaris on x86/AMD64 provides a rock solid and stable environment, most people really only need to have a single instance Solaris loaded to a disk anyway, since they rarely, if at all have a need to reboot.
( Jan 05 2005, 11:36:06 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [3]