I received my new server last week, and thus began my quest to try out new things, and move all my stuff from my old server.
My previous OS choice was Ubuntu, and Fedora before that. This time I’ve decided to go down the OpenSolaris route.
Once I got over the initial culture shock of the new environment, found out that the registration screen that appears on login to "Gnome"http://gnome.org desktop is only for Solaris, and then abandoned the GUI altogether, I discovered that OpenSolaris is a very nicely organised and setup OS.
I just did the default full install, and probably got loads of stuff I’ll never use. Once I had bash setup as my default shell, I was off exploring the various features.
My favorite things so far are…
- ZFS – Volume management has never been so easy.
- Zones/Containers – A (semi-)isolated OS virtualization technique, that makes separating your environment so easy.
- BlastWave – Although not actually part of Solaris, this package manager makes installing software almost as simple as apt-get in Ubuntu.
So far I’ve migrated my MySQL server to it’s own isolated Zone, and shall be moving my web servers across in the next few days.
