Users and customers of Oracle Solaris who were planning to install Solaris 11 on older legacy hardware may want to rethink that decision and save up money for new hardware. Oracle recently put out an end of life notice for Oracle Solaris 11 on older processors. As a result, the Oracle Solaris 11 install will be altered so that it will not work on UltraSparc I, II, IIe, III, IIIi, III+, IV and IV+ processors. The company has also announced that Solaris 11 will no longer run on 32-bit x86 systems as well.
Does My Sparc Server Support Oracle Solaris 11?
To find out if a particular workstation or server is subject to this end of life notice, type in the following command at the Solaris command prompt:
psrinfo -pv
Although this affects Sun Sparc processors that were introduced during the mid 1990s containing the UltraSparc I processors, it also affects some relatively modern systems. For example, the Sun Fire V445 server uses UltraSparc IIIi processors. This system was still sold by Sun in 2008.
Those who want to learn Oracle Solaris may want to think twice before buying that 1990s era Ultra 1 workstation on eBay, which worked surprisingly well for learning Oracle Solaris 10. With this change, the only way to use Oracle Solaris 11 on older hardware would be to use the Oracle Solaris 11 Express Development version which was released back in November 2010 with support for legacy processors.
Older Sparc Processor Support in Oracle Solaris 10, Solaris 9, and Solaris 8
Oracle Solaris 10 will support all of these legacy processors. With Oracle's current support policy, the company will continue to support customers for a minimum of eight years after the launch date. Oracle Solaris 10 was first released in January 2005. For Oracle Solaris 10, the support would be guaranteed until the beginning of 2013. After that, Oracle will continue to offer extended support for another three years, but the cost will be higher.
Historically, Sun and Oracle have been very willing to extend support for many years since they make a lot of money via support contracts on IT shops that are not able to upgrade. For example, Solaris 8's extended support won't lapse until 2012. Solaris 8 was released back in February 2000 during the dotcom era. Solaris 9, which was released in in March 2002, will continue to have extended support until October 2014.
Organizations that are using Oracle Solaris 10 on older hardware will likely feel much more pressure to move onto to Oracle's modern hardware offerings, especially if their software requires the current release due to new features in the OS. Many IT shops have not been able to upgrade their hardware and software for either budgetary or technical reasons over the years. As a result, it is not unusual to find hardware and software that has been running for 10 or more years. Because of this decision some difficult decisions will need to be made soon, especially if the software is more modern than the hardware platform.
