Sun Solaris 10

Installing Solaris 10 has not changed much over previous installations of Solaris. I installed the new code on a Sun Fire 280R SPARC-based machine as well as on a Sun Fire v20z AMD Opteron machine and put them to the test. On each platform, I performed the same tests, ensuring commands worked similarly on each platform. Sun's position of allowing Solaris to run on different platforms is a huge plus for the company, as SPARC-based processors are now lagging behind those from other manufacturers in terms of features like multi-core processors and processor speed (1.2-Ghz maximum).

DTrace is an application that has no predecessors. Simply put, there's nothing like it out there in any OS. It allows you to trace every aspect of a process running on the Solaris kernel. DTrace can peak inside the kernel and follow a running application as it opens files, accepts user input and opens network connections; it can tell you everything a process is doing.

Solaris developers will find this utility very useful. Using DTrace, you can find performance bottlenecks in your application and write your code to better utilize the resources available. It may even bring back those good ol' days when software developers wrote efficient code instead of relying on faster hardware to run inefficient software. After learning DTrace, Solaris admins may also be able to stop using truss and lsof to find problems with their machines. DTrace has a very structured language and complex command-line syntax, so take your time and learn it. It will be useful in the long run.

Using various Solaris container commands like zonecfg and zoneadm, I later created a zone used to test Web applications. Click to Enlarge