EXOTERIC - Information Worth Sharing: ex·o·ter·ic
-adj
1. Not confined to an inner circle of disciples or initiates.
2. Comprehensible to or suited to the public; popular.
3. Of or relating to the outside; external.

Currently our Solaris 8 and 9 software build environments are being run on much older Sun server systems. If and when these systems fail, we will either have to find replacement parts, or find other available old servers that can run on the old versions of the Solaris OS. All of our current generation of server systems require Solaris 10 as the minimum supported OS.

We have been experimenting with using Solaris Containers in order to duplicate a Solaris 8 or Solaris 9 build server environment on the latest Sun server systems. Solaris Containers technology was previously known as Project Etude.

The idea is to set up a Solaris Container on today's faster, cheaper, multithreaded servers that can run an older version of the Solaris operating system. Then you can run your legacy applications in this virtualized container. In our case the legacy application was performing old software patch builds that require a Solaris 8 or 9 build environment (header files and libraries).

We have now put up a Wiki page on the BigAdmin site that walks you through the process of setting up the Solaris 8 and 9 containers. Credits go to Vaishak Suvarna for putting together this wiki page and doing the proof of concept work for our build server environments. Now we can eliminate multiple, large legacy Sun server systems in our production labs and replace them with a single, more efficient CoolThreads server.