That's a very blunt statement of fact.
Yes, DTrace is great. ZFS has a lot of greatness if you overlook the bugs production systems have had (see: Joyent) to fix still (systems down for a week while they hand-fixed the FS - Yeah, fun stuff). Zones are cool, but has its drawbacks (and advantages) when compared to something like Xen.
> "A lot of it is even installed by default; it just isn't in the default PATH."
Uh, you know that when people talk about "Linux" they really mean "common GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/RHEL", right? You realize they mean more than gmake and gfind and gcc, right? Sorry, Solaris has absolutely nothing like the apt repositories available on Ubuntu (I know they're working on this, but that is still the not-so-stable-or-bug-free OpenSolaris, and it still isn't anywhere close, and we're talking about today, right?). Can I pull down svn, git, mercurial, bzr in a simple command? How about lighttpd, nginx, haproxy? What about a recent vim and emacs? Recent memcached, python/perl/ruby client for it? Those are all basic and well known, that isn't even the hard stuff. What about something a little more specific? PostGIS, GDAL, Proj? I can grab all of those on Ubuntu in a few seconds.
And of those you can compile from source yourself on Solaris, you'll find many a quirk because the project maintainers tend to run either a flavor of Linux or FreeBSD.
Yeah, Solaris is "better than Linux on servers", and my time isn't worth anything.
You're absolutely right, but when it's time to do something serious - in the Cal Henderson, irony laden, finger quote sense - you'll recompile them just the same.
Sorry, I've never bothered to recompile svn or python or many other things that my Linux install comes with. And I've use them every single day. For money. To feed my face hole.
Yes, when the time comes I can recompile anything on Ubuntu, but you know what? I'll take their already existing package, add patches, and easily create a .deb I can distribute among all the machines I use. Based on the existing package, with existing Ubuntu patches added that fix existing problems for me. Rather than going from scratch all alone in Solaris land.
In terms of the quality of the software this may well be the case. However I've got lots of experience with Linux (especially Ubuntu) and little with Solaris. Familiarity means I can develop more quickly on Linux than on Solaris. T|ime is money. Even if, on the same hardware, Solaris runs faster, with the money I've saved on quicker development times, I can buy more expensive (and therefore faster) hardware.
BTW, of the programs you meantion, the only one I've ever heard of is ZFS; I've no idea what they others are or what they do -- maybe Sun need to be better about getting the message out on how good their system is.
Are you really arguing that Sun has Linux beat on virtualization and isolation?
Sun also has Xen and VirtualBox (not as good as VMWare yet).
If you don't like Zones, fine. However many people are using them in a way that serves their needs - but perhaps not yours.
We consult all the time for F500 companies with pools of Solaris boxes. Some of them use Zones. None of them virtualize Solaris. All of them virtualize Linux, and can move entire Linux servers from machine to machine from a UI. It is hard to convince me that Solaris has any kind of edge in the server market.
I don't think security is an issue--it is true that there could be a security bug that would let some malicious code escape from a non-global zone to the global zone. But, AFAICT, that could happen with Xen too. Plus, if there is malicious code executing in a non-global zone then I'm already screwed since that is where my applications and data are.
Xen's live migration requires shared storage (AFAICT), which I don't have. That means that for my systems, Xen migration would work exactly the same as Zones migration (shut down the guest, move it to the new system, and start it up).
I chose Solaris Zones because (1) Zones have extremely low resource consumption, (2) they are extremely simple to manage, (3) they are extremely simple to backup and restore when the zone is on ZFS, and (4) I get to use all the Solaris manageability features.
Then think about the difference between Xen and Zones:
Zones share a kernel.
Xen machines do not.
This has two security implications:
* It is possible for there to be bugs that will allow one zone to see kernel resources (files, sockets, pids, IPC descriptors, etc) from another zone. It is impossible for that to happen with Xen, because VMs don't even know about each other.
* The majority of Solaris (and Linux) kernel vulnerabilities in the last several years have been kernel vulnerabilities, which Zones don't protect you from. The Xen hypervisor is significantly smaller than the Solaris kernel, and has had a far better security track record.
Yum and apt-get are better at patching and package installation than Solaris tools. However, the experience on Solaris isn't so bad that the whole OS has to be thrown away because if it. Besides, when IPS is released Solaris's package management will be better than both Yum and apt-get.