Oracle: Un-Publishes SPARC Solaris Roadmap?

Oracle: Un-Publishes SPARC Solaris Roadmap?

It has been the tradition of Oracle to maintain a public roadmap for the SPARC Solaris product line, since  the purchase of Sun Microsystems.

Normal

As of 2018, Oracle had been promoting a roadmap which illustrated a 2020 SPARC M8+.

 

Fujitsu Today

Fujitsu is still promoting, in 2019 on a roadmap, a new SPARC Server in 2020, as of Feb 25, 2019.

Oracle Today

The "Assets" link was previously available. The "Servers-Storage" link was also previously available. Today, they are no longer available. They had disappears, approximately in January 2019. Oracle's 2018 roadmap was available from  around May 25th.

It should be noted, Oracle's web site had gone through a re-design, with different base URL's now being available, so this could have just been an oversight.

Conclusions

Network Management had traditionally not listened to rumors in the industry, regarding layoffs, but had traditionally depended upon hard evidence such as documents, hiring announcements, code releases, etc. There is a degree of concern, in the industry, what Oracle intends on doing with SPARC & Solaris. Oracle continues to release updates for hardware management software, like OpsCenter, and Fujitsu appears to be holding on to it's roadmap.

DoD: Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs)

Abstract:

The US Department of Defense [DoD] released a document in regard to issued instruction 6500.01 which declared Defense Information Systems Agency [DISA] "develops and maintains control... security technical implementation guides (STIGs)... that implement and are consistent with DoD cybersecurity policies, standards, architectures, security controls, and validation procedures, with the support of the NA/CSS, using input from stakeholders". This resulted in the release of such documents.

STIGs

Security demands the rigorous standards which must abide by, uniformly, since security is only as good as it's weakest link. The DoD offers Oracle Solaris UNIX Operating System Security Technical Implementation Guides, for SPARC & Intel, as well as for Solaris 10 & 11. 

[html] Index

[zip] STIG - Solaris 10 SPARC Version  1 Release 24

[zip] STIG - Solaris 10 x86 Version  1 Release 24

[zip] STIG - Solaris 10 SPARC Version  1 Release 16

[zip] STIG - Solaris 10 x86 Version  1 Release 16

Conclusions

Solaris, for both SPARC and Intel Platforms, continue to be the safest platforms for implementing systems on, in the world. It should be noted that Solaris 10 is fast approaching end-of-life, therefore Solaris 11 should be considered a primary platform for implementation.

SPARC: Lift & Shift Solaris 10 ZFS RPool

SPARC: Lift & Shift Solaris 10 ZFS RPool

Abstract:

Since the adoption of SMP (Symmetric Multi Processing) by Sun Microsystems, there has been a shift in consolidation on chassis: co-hosting applications on a common OS instance, applications leveraging limited protections with "chroot", hosting multiple OS's on the same chassis through PDoms (Physical Domains), hosting multiple OS's via LDoms (Logical Domains), hosting applications in Solaris Containers (Zones). Sun had created techniques to lift-and-shift UFS based Solaris instances to LDoms, but had not provided a way forward for virtualization of ZFS bsed Solaris 10 systems... until days ago.

Solaris 10 P2V With ZFS Root

With Solaris 10 coming "end of life" and the push to Solaris 11 going strong, there is still a need to consolidate older model chassis. There is a guide called "Lift and Shift". Sekhar Lakkapragada, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Oracle, wrote an article on  how to accomplish this very task:

"Migrate Oracle Solaris 10 Physical Systems with ZFS root to Guest Domains in 3 Easy Steps" 

ldmp2vz

Sekhar posted a tool to accomplish this very activity, to the Oracle Solaris Blog. A short synopsis:

We are happy to announce that we now offer a new tool called ldmp2vz(1M) that can migrate Oracle Solaris 10 source systems with ZFS root. This tool has two commands; ldmp2vz_collect(1M) and ldmp2vz_convert(1M). These two commands enable migration of a sun4u or a sun4v Oracle Solaris 10 physical machine to an Oracle Solaris 10 guest domain on a system running Oracle Solaris 11 in the control domain as shown in this diagram.

In short, it is a 3 step process, not dissimilar from the ldmp2v tool:

1. Collection: Run ldmp2vz_collect(1M) on the source for system image and configuration
2. Preparation:  Create a new Oracle Solaris 10 SPARC guest domain using ovmtdeploy(8), Jumpstart, or DVD.
3.  Conversion: Run ldmp2vz_convert(1M) from prepared Solaris 10 guest domain using Live Upgrade technology.

Sekhar 

Conclusions:

This has been a long time coming, but it is welcome, none the less.