2015-02-20
All of our Solaris 10 machines are now out of production
Technically we did the final migration of filesystems from our old Solaris 10 fileservers to our new OmniOS ones on Wednesday evening, but in our view a migration is never really final until we've run the new thing in production for a while. Everything survived today without a hiccup, so we can now definitively say that all of our old Solaris 10 fileservers are out of production. We haven't actively and fully decommissioned them yet, in that almost everything is actually still running and many of the old ZFS pools are still there, but we've lagged a bit on that before.
These Solaris machines and their iSCSI backends had a very good run. It looks like our first production filesystems were brought up in September of 2008 on what was probably Solaris 10 update 5 (we soon moved to update 6 and then eventually update 8, where we stopped). Running until now means that they lasted almost six and a half years in production without real problems.
(That was six and a half years on the same server hardware; they all stayed on our original SunFire X2200 servers (and X2100s for the iSCSI backends). Some of the iSCSI backends probably still have the original 750 GB SATA disks we started with, and they pretty much all have their original system disks.)
I've already written an overall retrospective on our environment, but I want to say (again) that Solaris 10 was a totally solid operating system over its lifetime here and gave us good service. It may not have been the most modern thing and I have my issues with bits of ZFS and Solaris administration and so on, but it kept running and running and running. We could (and did) leave the machines up for very long periods of time and never touch them and nothing fell over, even under NFS load. I expect good things from OmniOS, but it does have big shoes to fill; Solaris has set a high bar for trouble-free operation.
(OmniOS will probably never be as 'stable' as Solaris in that we'll likely feel a need to update it more often and not totally freeze it the way we wound up doing with Solaris 10 update 8. It helps that OmniOS makes this less painful than Solaris updates and so on were, although we'll have to see.)
In that Solaris 10 is in some ways one of the last artifacts of a Sun that no longer exists, I feel a bit sad to see it go. It was time and past time for us to update things and OmniOS is a perfectly good successor (our 10G problems notwithstanding), but it doesn't come from the exciting Sun of the mid to late 00s even if many of the same people are still involved with it.
(Oracle Solaris is a different beast entirely, one that's gone all sharp-elbowed business suit because that's what Oracle is.)