To start with, I am not an expert of solaris and VMs. Unfortunately, I can't find a direct or understandable (at least to me) answer to my question online. So please, excuse me if my question will sound dumb to you. :o
We have 2 remaining solaris 8 servers are on sparc architecture. They cannot be discarded because of some tools that can only run in solaris. Can these solaris 8 servers be virtualized? If not, why?
Do you have any other Sparc platforms??? You can virtualize Solaris 8 on a Solaris 10 platform. The requirement to move a Solaris 8 system off creaking hardware that might fail is quite common and this is well catered for. However, you need to know the Sun/Oracle terminology for all this stuff in order to find the necessary information on the web. I can detail all this in a following post if you have other more modern Sparc hardware that you want to move to. If you don't, then I'd be wasting me time in doing that.
Yes, QEMU as suggested by Neo is an option but, in my experience, using emulation (to translate the Sparc instruction set into x86 instructions) is very slow and a bit of a nightmare to configure. In many situations it's not practical.
So question is, what more modern Sparc hardware do you have?
Unfortunately, we don't have Solaris 10 platform. Currently, our server is working fine but because this is an old server, I am already looking into the possibility of this server breaking up soon. I have to talk to the engineers on alternatives for their tools so they can also start looking. Also, as Neo suggested, we will take a look also on this emulator.
If you get a high end x86 machine (which are not expensive) running a modern era emulator, they will more-than-likely out perform a very old Sparc machine.
In addition, it depends on the application and what the application is designed to do. I would not worry too much about performance before you actually build and test. You might find your application on a modern X86 machine running an emulator out performs your old Sparc machine
You can easily build one and test it yourself before you deploy it.
Or, if you have to acquire hardware anyway, you could get a cheap Sparc box capable of running Solaris 10 (Solaris 8 virtualization is not support under Solaris 11) and virtualize both your Solaris 8 systems on the same box.
That's a creative thought, but I don't think that accomplishes what forextrafun wants to do.
He already has two Sparc boxes (EOS 2012) he wants to get rid of as part of his consolidation efforts, because he says, "2 remaining solaris 8 servers are on sparc architecture".
Replacing two obsolete Sparc boxes (EOS 2012) with two Sparc boxes may not help him if his goal (in the first post) to get rid of his "last two remaining Sparc boxes.".
I think he wants to get completely off Sparc architecture completely and consolidate on X86 (assumed in my first reply), based on this first post and follow up replies. That is why he wants to "virtualize", I think; but since he did not state that clearly, it's hard to tell his ultimate motivation.
However, if they continue to run and support other Sparc servers, then virtualizing Solaris 8 on Solaris 10 might be a great idea, for sure, since Solaris 10 is EOS 2024.
@Peasant........yes, agreed, that LDOM is the best solution if Sparc based. I was also citing a probably cheaper solution by using a second-user piece of tin running Solaris 10 GZ and two NGZ Solaris 8 branded zones within.
I doubt with somewhat high probility the original poster is looking to replace a Sparc server with a Sparc server.
His organization is probably in "consolidate and retire" mode as a cost-savings measure (not a technical exercise) and they have two remaining (has he says) Sparc servers they want to retire. It's more expensive for organizations to maintain two difference architectures (like X86 and Sparc) than a single architecture like X86; and based on the wording in the original poster's replies, I think it may safe to assume that retiring two Sparc servers and replacing them with other Sparc servers is not their business objective.
I could be wrong, but the odds are in my favor of being correct; and we will not know until the OP posts back.
However, based on my experience working in many data center transitions, I highly suspect the business goal for the OP's organization is to retire all legacy Sparc machines in favor of x86, inline with what most other organizations are doing these days, as cost-cutting measure (not a technical measure), which is a good idea anyway.
In most organization, the cost of the hardware is very small compared to the cost of skilled-labor to maintain (and the recurring annual software licenses), so I doubt anyone really cares about a few dollars here and their for hardware changes in this case.
Currently, our server is working fine but because this is an old server, I am already looking into the possibility of this server breaking up soon. I have to talk to the engineers on alternatives for their tools so they can also start looking. Also, as Neo suggested, we will take a look also on this emulator.
