So I was asked about upgrading some older Sun/Oracle hardware to Solaris 11. The systems in question are all currently running Solaris 10. Solaris 11 was introduced on November 9, 2011 so it hasn’t been around too long yet. But Solaris 10 has been around since 2005 which makes the Unix OS as old as some of our hardware. The full version of Solaris 11 no longer supports legacy processor architectures UltraSPARC I, II, IIe, III, IIIi, III+, IV and IV+. In the world of Sun/Oracle hardware, these don’t go to 11.

The list of our somewhat dated hardware currently running Solaris 10 includes:

System and Codename	Processor Type and Maximum Number
Sun Netra 440                        Chalupa 19	4x UltraSPARC IIIi
Sun Blade 150                Grover Plus	1x UltraSPARC IIi
Sun Fire V440                 Chalupa	4× UltraSPARC IIIi
Sun Fire V880                 Daktari	8× UltraSPARC III/III+
Sun Fire V890                 Silverstone	8× UltraSPARC IV/IV+
Sun Ultra 45                           Chicago	2x UltraSPARC IIIi

The processors are UltraSPARC IIi, UltraSPARC III/III+ and UltraSPARC IV/IV+, all of which are not supported in the production release of Solaris 11. (They were still supported in the ‘Express’ beta version of Solaris 11 released in November 2010.) Looks we are due for new hardware, which of course is what Larry Ellison wants. Racing sail boats can be expensive. 🙂

If you need to find out what version of Solaris you are running and what type of processors you have, use the uname –a and psrinfo –pv commands.

sunbox% uname -a

SunOS sunbox 5.10 Generic_127111-03 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-880

sunbox% psrinfo -pv

The physical processor has 1 virtual processor (0)

  UltraSPARC-III+ (portid 0 impl 0x15 ver 0xb0 clock 1200 MHz)

The physical processor has 1 virtual processor (2)

  UltraSPARC-III+ (portid 2 impl 0x15 ver 0xb0 clock 1200 MHz)

sunbox%

We are still using old iron in a standalone test environment that doesn’t have to meet the demands of real production servers. At least we aren’t still using the old ‘pizza box’ or the Sun E10K systems from the 1990’s.

Note that If you do try to install Solaris 11 or boot from a Solaris 11 DVD on unsupported hardware, you will get an error similar to this:

Error: 'SUNW,UltraSPARC-IIIi' is not supported by this release of Solaris.
Program terminated
{1} ok

Moving more legacy systems to linux anyone?