Summary: Upgrade Solaris 8 to 9 or 10

Many thanks to Tim C., Ian M., Darren D., John D., Rich T. for their
excellent responses.  I've tried to summarize in the best way I can and
combined links from people to check out.

 

>Is it possible to upgrade from Solaris 8 to 10 or do I go to 9 first?
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It is possible to upgrade from solaris 8 to 10, no problem. Solaris 10 has
enhancements that may yield better performance than solaris9 on the same
hardware.

 

>In what ways solaris 10 better than 9?

Solaris10 does some things "slightly differently" than 

Solaris9 and earlier, so if you make this jump you may have to learn some
new things (gasp). I.e., /etc/inetd.conf is no longer in use (for example) ;
the way run levels are controlled along with services at startup is
different, (much faster startup time :-) ; etc.

 

Solaris 10 is many times better than Solaris 9 with the obvious new
technologies such as DTrace and Fault Management Architecture (FMA). Solaris
has an ABI (Application Binary Interoperability) guarantee. Basically if an
application has been written correctly and functions on Solaris 2.6, it
should run on Solaris 7, 8, 9 and 10. Solaris 9 (and possibly 8) come with a
test suite called "appcert" which you can use to verify application
'portability' before upgrading.

 

Use Liveupgrade to go from 8 to 10 since it provides ABE (Alternate Boot
Environment) to running install and one can reboot back to previous
environment if there is an issue with application.

 

Features of Solaris 10:

 

     + zones

     + DTrace

     + smf and predictive self healing

     + ZFS (still to come)

     + FireEngine (new TCP/IP stack)

     + NFSv4

 

Other than ZFS which isn't general availability yet I have seenbenefit from
each and every one of the above

 

Disadvantages:

Does not support A1000. Solaris 10 on SPARC platforms does not support 32
bit mode.

Solaris 10 is only supported on Sun4U systems, all of which support 64bit
operation, so 32 bit support was dropped.

 

 

Links to check out:

What's new in Solaris 10...

 <http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0547>
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0547

 

When is Solaris 8 End Of Line...

 <http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/releases.xml>
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/releases.xml

 <http://www.sun.com/service/support/eosl/>
http://www.sun.com/service/support/eosl/

 <http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/9/fcc/lifecycle.xml>
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/9/fcc/lifecycle.xml

 

What Platforms 32 bit mode...

 <http://iforce.sun.com/protected/solaris10/adoptionkit/x86/techinfo.html>
http://iforce.sun.com/protected/solaris10/adoptionkit/x86/techinfo.html

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Raval, Nikul 
Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2005 4:39 PM
To: 'sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org'
Subject: Upgrade Solaris 8 to 9 or 10


Is it possible to upgrade from Solaris 8 to 10 or do I go to 9 first?
In what ways solaris 10 better than 9?  How long Solaris 8 supported by SUN?
Both 9 and 10 can run in 32 bit??
 
Please share your thoughts, opinions....
 
Thanks
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