[OpenIndiana-discuss] [zfs-discuss] best migration path from Solaris 10

[Paul B. Henson]

On 3/18/2011 3:15 PM, Garrett D'Amore wrote:

> a) Nexenta Core Platform is a bare-bones OS.  No GUI, in other words
> (no X11.)  It might well suit you.

Indeed :), my servers are headless (well, as headless as you can get on
x86 hardware 8-/, they do have an ipmi remote console that still needs
to be used occasionally <sigh>) and I generally install a minimal set of
packages. We have the X client libraries installed on some of our linux
servers, as our DBA's like to run the gui oracle installer, but I don't
recall ever needing to run X software on our storage servers. One of my
many spats with Oracle technical support (the database side, not the
operating system side) was trying to get them to justify why the
"xscreensaver" package was listed as a core dependency of running 10g
under RHEL 5 :(. Never did get an answer to that, they just closed the
ticket out from under me...

> c) NCP 4 is still 5-6 months away.  We're still developing it.

By the time I do some initial evaluation, then some prototyping, I don't
anticipate migrating anything production wise until at the earliest
Christmas break, so that timing shouldn't be a problem. Any thoughts on
how soon a beta might be available? As it sounds like there will be
significant changes, it might be better to evaluate with a beta of the
new stuff rather than the production version of the older stuff. Plus I
generally tend to break things in unexpected ways ;), so doing that in
the beta cycle might be beneficial.

> d) NCP 4 will make much more use of the illumos userland, and only
> use Debian when illumos doesn't have an equivalent.

Given both NCP and OpenIndiana will be based off of illumos, and as of
version 4 NCP will be migrating as much as possible of the userland to
solaris as opposed to gnu, other than the differing packaging formats
what do you feel will distinguish NCP from openindiana? NCP is positioned as
a bare-bones server, whereas openindiana is trying to be more general
purpose including desktop use?

> e) NCP comes entirely unsupported.  NexentaStor is a commercial
> product with real support behind it, though.

Can you treat NexentaStor like a general purpose operating system, not
use the management gui, and configure everything from a shell prompt, or
is it more appliance like and you're locked out from the OS? In other
words, would it be possible (although not necessarily cost-effective) to
pay for NexentaStor for the support but treat it like NCP?

Has your company considered basic support contracts for NCP? I've heard
from at least one other site that might be interested in something like
that. We don't need much in the way of handholding, the majority of our
support calls end up being actual bugs or limitations in solaris. But if
one of our file servers panics, doesn't import a pool when it boots, and
crashes every time you try to import it by hand, it would be nice to
have an engineer available :).

Thanks...


-- 
Paul B. Henson  |  (909) 979-6361  |  http://www.csupomona.edu/~henson/
Operating Systems and Network Analyst  |  henson at csupomona.edu
California State Polytechnic University  |  Pomona CA 91768