Selecting a flavor of Solaris for a home server

Submitted by josh on Tue, 06/16/2009 - 01:22

I have had my ZFS home server up and running for a few months now, but it was no easy endeavor to get it working the way I wanted it to.  I don't know how much of the difficulty was from trying to treat Solaris like it was linux, or if Solaris just doesn't do some things very well.  I figure since I have fought the battles, I may as well share some of what I have learned.

Distro Choice

This should have been easy, after all Solaris is Solaris right?  There are 3 main distributions to look into, Sun Solaris 10, Solaris Express Community Edition (Project Nevada), and OpenSolaris.

  • Sun Solaris 10 - Distributed by Sun (Tested, Tried, Stable)
  • Solaris Express Community Edition - Based on OpenSolaris, 2 week release cycle, next gen Solaris
  • OpenSolaris - Open source Solaris distro, tries to compete with Linux in the desktop market

Now that I learned a little about the main distros, I have to make a choice.  This proves to be the most difficult part and I am still fighting with myself over which distro I like best.

Sun Solaris 10

Pros

  • STABLE
  • Long release cycle
  • Supported for a long time
  • Ability to set up a mirror to boot from in the installer

Cons

  • Installer REALLY sucks
  • Not going to get the latest and greatest features
  • Userland applications are some strange variation of their GNU counterparts

Solaris Express Community Edition (Solaris Nevada)

Pros

  • Latest and greatest
  • free Solaris packages that Sun would otherwise make you pay for
  • better installer than Sun Solaris
  • Ability to set up a mirror to boot from in the installer

Cons

  • Fast 2 week release cycle
  • full of "bugs" (more on this later)
  • Package management kind of sucks

OpenSolaris

Pros

  • Great installer
  • the most user friendly of the three
  • package management that even linux lovers can get used to

Cons

  • No way to set up a mirror set in the installer
  • No way to choose which packages to include and exclude in the install
  • No "Server Edition"

Conclusion

After a lot of trial and error with VMware and even physical hardware, I settled on Solaris Express Community Edition.  I know it is bleeding edge and "full of bugs" but I haven't had that many problems so far.  There are a lot of really specific areas that I need to expand on that I find irritating and that I really love, but that is a topic for another post.  Soon I will get into the specifics of my configuration and my neverending battle with solaris.  The final thing I will say is, ZFS makes it all worth the extra effort.