Monday October 22, 2007
I'm very happy to announce that the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant 1.0 (also known as Project Etude) has shipped! The product is now officially available from Sun. Some key links:
- You can download and install the product (a free 90 day eval license is provided)
- You can browse the documentation online
- You can read the FAQ
- You can learn more from my previous blog entries about Etude (here, and here)
- You can contact your local Sun representative to learn more about this technology
In a nutshell, the product provides a migration solution from Solaris 8 to Solaris 10 by creating a bridge between the two operating systems. You can perform P2V (physical-to-virtual) conversions of existing Solaris 8 systems, and drop those into Solaris 8 containers running on your Solaris 10 host.
Above all, I want to take another chance to thank the many people who worked extremely hard for the past eight months to make this project a reality. It was sprint from start to finish, which is certainly tough on everyone involved. But I was amazed and pleased that almost universally, people helped us out with dedication and a good sense of humor. Thank you very much.
(2007-10-22 14:11:37.0) Permalink Comments [5]
Tags: containers etude solaris solaris8 virtualization zones
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/dp/entry/solaris_8_migration_assistant_1
congrats Dan... I'm amazed at how quickly that went! 8 months is impressive.
Posted by stevel on October 22, 2007 at 05:41 PM PDT #
So, a flar created on a sun4u system can be jumpstart installed into a sun4v LDOM...
Now, it would be nice if the sun4u to sun4v trick could be leveraged for Solaris 10 to Solaris 10
server consolidation efforts as well as the 8 to 10
Brandz approach.
Is that supported sun4u to sun4v flar for consolidation in Solaris 10.
Posted by McD on October 22, 2007 at 10:38 PM PDT #
I am a little surprised by the fact that it only comes in SPARC flavors. There are still a few countries in which Sun is the _ONLY_ big enterprise player missing from the scene, thus Solaris runs on x86 boxes from HP or IBM usually, although Dell is not that uncommon. Guys, my point is that, while in theory it's a great tool, in practice, there are a few things missing, such as x86 support, which is a lot more common in countries, such as Romania, where SPARC boxes don't really exist (not that it's our fault).
Posted by Razvan Corneliu C.R. VILT on October 22, 2007 at 11:32 PM PDT #
Razvan, Thanks for your comments. When interviewing customers in advance of building S8MA, we were unable to locate any customers who said that they would be interested in migrating Solaris 8 x86 machines in this fashion. While it would be great to support this, in practice it would be a fair amount of work. If we see enough demand for it, we'll certainly consider doing it.
How much Solaris 8 do you have, compared to Solaris 9 and Solaris 10?
Posted by Dan Price on October 22, 2007 at 11:48 PM PDT #
Short story: I am confident that I could do without this on my network, but I would find some interesting uses for S8MA_i86pc if it would be available, and I can think of at least two cases in which it's very useful.
Long story: Only 2 Solaris 8 systems, running on x86 in production, and a few ghost images for testing on Solaris 8. To be perfectly honest, I think I could migrate them to Solaris 10 in about 4 hours (both, in parallel) as there's nothing fancy about them. On the other hand, I am fascinated by the geekness factor (the technology) of this BrandZ container.
While I am sure that this post proves your point, there is one place where I can still see this as invaluable, if accompanied by support for other Solaris releases (2.6, 7, 9 and possibly 10 if by that time Nevada comes out): build machines and software testing (for userland stuff). For the latter, it would also help if the vconsole project finished the virtual console implementation.
When I think of old Solaris releases, I can really think only of the educational value, as I am not using them almost at all, but I would like to play with a Solaris 2.6 or 2.4 for intel on some vitage hardware I have at home. Unfortunately, I can't find any releases of Solaris older than 7 anywhere I've looked. From 7 upwards, I have a CD version and a DVD version - where one was provided - for each x86 release.
Hint: That basically translates into: I am looking for Solaris < 7 x86 releases (images of, would do just fine), for non-production, hobby purposes.
Posted by Razvan Corneliu C.R. VILT on October 23, 2007 at 12:14 AM PDT #