Oracle announced today that Dell and HP will certify and resell all Oracle operating systems – Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM – on their x86 server systems.

According to this post by Joerg Moellenkamp, Oracle Premier Support for Solaris on HP servers is once again available, with purchase options through HP and directly from Oracle as well. HP’s Solaris Support Matrix is here.

It seems a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth could have been avoided if someone at Oracle had just said “We’re reworking the OEM agreements, give us a month or two.”

According to this Register article, IBM is ceasing sales of Solaris 10 on its x86-64 hardware as of August 27th. It is not clear at this time whether Oracle has pulled IBM’s OEM license (as it did with HP), or if IBM is making this change on its own. Dell is now the only remaining third-party vendor of Solaris on x86 hardware.

A member of the SunHELP Rescue list details in this mailing list post his attempts to purchase a license for Solaris 10 from Oracle.

If you want to purchase a Solaris 10 license (which is NOT the same as a Support Contract), all you have to do is buy a Solaris 10 “Media Pack”.

“The Solaris 10 license is bundled into the media pack (it is on a component CD). Therefore, this license comes free with the media pack purchase. While the agreement text is a little confusing, the moment you receive the media pack and open it, you will no longer be operating under trial terms.”

Oracle has announced some new x86 servers and other hardware.

* The X4800 is an 6RU 8-socket Xeon 7600 system with up to 1TB of RAM and 4 or 8 CPUs.
* The X4470 is a 3RU 4-socket Xeon 7500 system with up to 512GB of RAM and up to 4 CPUs.
* The X4270M2 is a 2RU 2-socket Xeon 5600 system with up to 144G of RAM and two CPUs.
* The X4170M2 is a 1RU 2-socket Xeon 5600 system with up to 144G of RAM and two CPUs.

Also announced were new blade CPU cards, network expansion modules, and the 1U Sun 72port 10G Ethernet switch.

According to this Heise Online article (in German), new machines using the Xeon 5600 and 7500 CPUs will be announced next week by John Fowler, Sun Vice-President of Systems.

According to this Register article, Oracle has cancelled HP’s OEM contact to distribute, sell, and support Solaris on HP Proliant x64 systems.

From HP’s notification:

As you may have heard, Oracle has exercised its right to terminate HP’s Solaris technical support agreement. If you have purchased Solaris 10 Subscriptions and Software Technical Support for HP ProLiant servers from HP, then you will continue to receive subscription support from Oracle and technical support from HP for the period of your contract. You will be able to purchase 1 and 3 year Solaris 10 Subscriptions and Support from HP until July1, 2010. No renewals will be accepted after this date. HP will deliver technical support through June 30, 2013. After that date, HP will no longer be in a position to provide Solaris technical support.
Additionally, starting with ProLiant G7 servers, HP will no longer certify and support Solaris on ProLiant. Solaris certified and supported ProLiant G6 servers will support up to Solaris 10 10/09 or Update 8 for the standard hardware support period (5 years from the date of shipment).

Oracle’s OEM agreement for Solaris on Dell hardware remains in effect.

Oracle has released an updated Solaris Roadmap with details on the future of Solaris and OpenSolaris.

Some excerpts:

Oracle will continue to make OpenSolaris available as open source and Oracle will continue to actively support and participate in the OpenSolaris community

Oracle is investing more in Solaris than Sun did prior to the acquisition, and will continue to contribute innovative technologies to OpenSolaris, as Oracle already does for many other open source projects

Solaris 10 Next update CY2010 (“Update 9”)

OpenSolaris Next update 1st half CY2010

Bordeaux for OpenSolaris: for running MS programs without full Windows OS

Fluendo DVD Player for OpenSolaris

The way-long-overdue SUNHELP.ORG server upgrade is completed. Last night I migrated everything from the old Sun E420R (4x450Mhz US-II, 4G RAM, dual 18G disks) to the new T1000 (8-core 1Ghz UltraSPARC T1, 8G RAM, 1T SATA disk). Everything appears to be running fine so far.

Thanks to everyone for their patience. I intended to do this last June/July, but the death of my wife threw things for a loop and it fell to the back of my priorities list for a while.

Ben Rockwood and I were quoted in this article at TechTarget’s SearchDataCenter site concerning Oracle’s changes to Solaris support.

I’m at my wit’s end, here, so I’m posting in hopes that someone else might have had this problem.

I finally got all of the hardware for the new SunHELP server in place at the remote colo (in Austin),
and shipped them the disk (WD RE3 1TB “Raid Edition” SATA). It arrived and was installed in the system today.
The T1000 has the latest firmware for the OBP and ALOM installed as of last Friday.

The disk was fine when I tested it here before shipping, and didn’t have any problems during the (jumpstart) install. However, after install (with zfs root pool on the single disk) and reboot, I get a ton of these:

WARNING: /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@8/scsi@2/sd@0,0 (sd1):
        Error for Command: write(10)               Error Level: Retryable
        Requested Block: 369161036                 Error Block: 369161036
        Vendor: ATA                                Serial Number:      WD-WMAT
        Sense Key: Unit Attention
        ASC: 0x29 (power on, reset, or bus reset occurred), ASCQ: 0x0, FRU: 0x0

Never anything more than a “Retryable” error level. “zpool scrub” says I have no errors. The disk is using
the same SATA and power cables that were plugged into the “factory” 80G SATA disk, which worked fine before
it was removed to put in the 1T drive.

If anyone else has seen issues like this with WD SATA drives and SPARC systems, please let me know.

Update: I’d like to publicly thank Hichael Morton for buying and overnighting a Hitachi 1TB SATA disk so that the server upgrade can go as planned while I figure out what the problem with the Western Digital disk is.

A number of people have emailed me about a “sort-of” Sun spotting in the new Tron Legacy Trailer.

A computer console shows a system type of

SolarOS 4.0.1 Generic_50203-A2 Sun4m i386 Unknown.Unknown

Click the image for a full-sized 1080p screen capture.

Martha Starkey was kind enough to send in some updates for the Sun PPP resources page.

Peter Tribble has some notes from the OpenSolaris Annual Meeting.

Oracle will continue to make OpenSolaris available as open source, and Oracle will continue to actively support and participate in the community.

Oracle will also continue to deliver OpenSolaris releases, including the upcoming OpenSolaris 2010.03 release.

Oracle is investing more in Solaris than Sun did prior to the acquisition, and will continue to contribute technologies to OpenSolaris, as Oracle already does for many other open source projects.

SunHELP is now proud to host a mirror of Eric Rucker’s Sun-1 Archive: “Documents, images, and files published by Stanford University, VLSI Systems, and Sun Microsystems relating to the Sun-1 workstation and predecessor designs.”