Zones & LDOMs
Built-in virtualization: zones (OS-level) and logical domains (hardware-level) to isolate workloads safely.
Solaris · Introduction to Solaris
Solaris · Lesson 1
Introduction to Solaris
Complete introduction to Oracle Solaris 11 operating system. Understand architecture, enterprise use cases and SPARC platform importance. Overview of ZFS, SMF, Zones and LDoms technologies. Perfect starting point for Solaris administrators.
What is Solaris?
Solaris is an enterprise-grade UNIX operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems and now maintained by Oracle. It is designed for stability, scalability and long-running production workloads, especially on SPARC servers.
You will mostly find Solaris in environments where downtime is very costly: banking, telecom, government, large enterprises and legacy datacenters that still run critical applications on SPARC hardware.
Why do companies still use Solaris?
Even though Linux is more popular now, Solaris still has strong features that many enterprises rely on. Think of Solaris as a specialised, battle-tested UNIX made for big, critical systems.
ZFS File System
Powerful filesystem with snapshots, checksums, compression, quotas and easy rollbacks — a huge plus for admins.
Strong Integration
Tight integration with SPARC hardware and Oracle stack, giving predictable performance and behaviour.
Reliability & SMF
Service Management Facility (SMF) helps keep services healthy and auto-restores failed components.
Where will *you* see Solaris as an admin?
If you join an enterprise focused on critical workloads, chances are high that you will touch Solaris at some point. Typical places where Solaris still runs:
Banking & Finance
- Core banking applications
- Payment switches & reconciliation
- High-availability database servers
Telecom & Networking
- Billing systems and mediation servers
- Network management & provisioning apps
Government / PSU
- Critical citizen-facing services
- Legacy but stable applications
Large Enterprises
- Old but important ERP / internal systems
- Apps that were never migrated off SPARC
Solaris vs Linux – high-level view
As a system admin, you don't need to treat Solaris as a completely new world. Many concepts are similar to Linux, but the commands, tools and defaults are slightly different.
In Linux
In Solaris
systemd used for service management.
SMF (svcs / svcadm) handles services with better dependency tracking.
Popular filesystems: ext4, XFS, btrfs (optional).
ZFS is the default filesystem with snapshots, checksums and more.
Virtualization often done with KVM, containers or cloud.
Zones & LDOMs provide in-built virtualization on the same host.
The goal of this course is to make you comfortable moving between Linux knowledge you already have and Solaris specific tools and workflows.
After this course, you should be able to…
- Log in to Solaris systems confidently and explore them.
- Manage users, groups, services, storage and networking on Solaris 11.
- Understand zones, ZFS, SMF and other Solaris-specific building blocks.
- Read and troubleshoot common logs and issues seen in enterprise environments.
Next up: we move from theory to hands-on by installing Solaris and walking through the first boot experience.