Hidden Features of Solaris/OpenSolaris

Solution 1:

Live Upgrade, which uses ZFS, creates writable snapshots of the operating system boot environment. With Live Upgrade, you can apply patches to a snapshot boot environment, then make that snapshot bootable. Upon the next reboot you get a patched OS environment. If you discover an issue with a patch, you can make the old snapshot bootable, reboot and you've backed out your changes. Its a pretty impressive solution to patching.

ZFS for the boot environment requires Solaris 10u6 or newer.

Also, Solaris Zones are pretty useful for application isolation. Obviously DTrace is very nice but RedHat is playing catchup with System Tap.

Solution 2:

ZFS, DTrace and SMF are hardly hidden features since anyone who has ever heard of Solaris also has heard of them.

If you'd really like to get to know some hidden/less known features of Solaris, I recommend you read the Less known Solaris Features ebook by Jörg Möllenkamp.

Solution 3:

Don't forget SMF (Service Management). I have yet to see something comparable for linux (any pointers gratefully accepted). It did save me (and colleagues) a lot of ticket handling :)

Solution 4:

There are a number of features that Solaris has that Linux people wish they had. These include:

• ZFS: a filesystem that provides extreme flexibility, more than anything now available. Dynamic growth and reduction, snapshots, clones, and more - all available for free.
• DTrace: a debugger that can present you with details on how the kernel is working. Because of the way the kernels are written, DTrace is inherently much more flexible than SystemTap.
• SMF: yet another system to replace System V init scripts - but this one seems to have more people interested in it than any of the others.
• Zones and Containers: these are very flexible and have a lot of people excited: they provide for very flexible virtualization.