[OpenIndiana-discuss] best migration path from Solaris 10

[Nikola M.]

On 03/18/11 10:56 PM, Paul B. Henson wrote:
> We've been running Solaris 10 for the past couple of years, primarily
> to leverage zfs to provide storage for about 40,000 faculty, staff,
> and students as well as about 1000 groups. Access is
Questions are: Do you care of your OS being open and not tight to only
one company, and do you care for software and packaging compatibility
and do you need payed support or not and do you need it right now or in
the future?
Do you want to tie yourself with Oracle and closed Solaris products?
(even if unofficially there were saying that they might open code after
S11 release)
If you used closed product before, that might be your enterprise upgrade
path. Just prepare to cache Oracle out and that is it.

If you want to use free open source with ability to buy suport and all
you want to use is zfs,
then Nexenta is your way with their both free to use releases and
commercially supported ones.
Nexenta support development of Illumos that is future base of
OpenIndiana, too.
So Nexenta is something like what Sun previously was doing, they are
actively developing it and you can have support for less money then from
Oracle, I suppose.

OpenIndiana is and will contiue to be closest you can get to Oracle
Solaris releases. It shares software consolidations (and packaging,
IPS,pkg) with closed brother. OpenIndiana has stable release in mind in
near future, that might suit your needs.
Dev OpenIndiana releases are (slowly) following path of OpenSolaris dev
releases,
so OpenIndiana can be right now Solaris 10 replacement (many people just
continued to use OI dev) and in the future, with transition to Illumos
base ahead in mind.

I think that best thing you can do is to install OpenSolaris snv_134 (or
134b) and from that point you can see where you can go: To OpenIndiana
dev and then follow Illumos development and wait for OpenIndiana stable
, And try even closed Solaris Express 11.
(with No zfs upgrade to Solaris Express version (!) - Be sure Not to do
zfs and zpool upgrade to closed Solaris 11 express version, because you
will be then locked-in in Oracle zfs versions.)
I do not know how Nexenta could be installed in the same zpool in new BE
but I suppose it can, since I know upgrading Nexenta use zfs BE's, too.

That way, with multiple installs and sharing zfs between them, you are
on safe ground of being able to test and choose to what will come in
future and ,beside Oracle, there are at least 2 solutions now and in the
future, that you can consider.

I would personally like if one could buy support from Nexenta and
continue to use OpenIndiana or Nexenta :) But Nexenta is more
server-like and OpenIndiana is shooting to all-around solution.