Benefits of Using Ops Center

There was a brief announcement concerning the "Benefits to using Ops Center" on the Oracle Blogs today.

Ops Center 12c also adds Solaris 11 features for bare-metal OS Provisioning, based on the Solaris 11 Auto Install (AI) facility.  Ops Center configures the Solaris 11 AI in a way that shields admins from needing to write custom AI manifests or custom "first boot" packages.  Solaris 11 deployments using Ops Center follow similar profile-based patterns as for Solaris 10 or Linux, all of which can all be deployed from the same Ops Center infrastructure running on Solaris 11.

Some good news:

Solaris 11 with AI, Solaris 10 JumpStart with JET, or Linux with Kickstart or AutoYast.  All of those OS's are handled by Ops Center under the covers, based on whatever network boot capability the OS requires (PXE/DHCP, WANBOOT, or AI), and all from the same Ops Center infrastructure running on Solaris 11.

This, of course, is a welcome addition. The core question of the day is:

• Does Ops Center support other OS's besides Solaris and Linux?

With the death of Xen under Solaris, if you want to run multiple OS's (via KVM) under a solid Solaris foundation including best-in-class analytics (via DTrace) and best-in-class file system (via ZFS) with an option for a public cloud (for Joyent) - there is only one OS option: SmartOS.

Solaris 11 is dubbed "the first cloud OS". Joyent is one of the first Solaris based cloud providers, basing their implementation on a fork of OpenSolaris in conjunction with aport of  KVM. Joyent's SmartOS offers a public cloud option for private clouds built upon SmartOS KVM.

Network Management Connection
Whether Ops Center can support SmartOS on bare-metal is an outstanding question. One might expect that Ops Center would have limited or no visibility to the  KVM based virtual machines. If Oracle has any interest in not forcing commercial cloud providers to have to build competing cloud management technology, they might be well advised to add some level of support to Ops Center, so they could profit from doing next to no work.