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Welcome to the Solaris™ Operating System Technical Essentials course.

The purpose of this course is to provide technical pre-sales system engineers of Solaris and
OpenSolaris with the skills and knowledge required to support account executives in the areas of:
•Product presentation
•Responding to customer objections and technical questions
•Providing systems configurations and
•Conducting a competitive analysis of a solution
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At the completion of this course, SEs should be able to communicate how specific features and
options help the customer to meet their business enablement, cost reduction, and risk reduction
goals. Successful completion of this course is determined by obtaining a passing score of 80% or
higher on the online exam.

This course begins with a brief overview of the Solaris and Open Solaris operating systems
followed by a summary of the latest features. Each feature is covered in greater detail in the
succeeding modules.

The Solaris Sales Essentials course, WZT-FS1395, is a prerequisite to this course. The content of
this course is based on the assumption that you have already completed the sales essentials
course.
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The version of Solaris based on the UNIX operating system was introduced by Sun Microsystems in 1992. Solaris
supports SPARC and x86-based workstations and servers from Sun and other vendors.
Solaris 10 is the latest release of the Solaris operating system and includes many new features and functionalities.

Solaris 10 Supports:
- SPARC-based and x86-based servers, workstations and laptops:
- Solaris is compatible with over 100 SPARC and over 1000 x86-based systems. See sun.com/solaris/hcl for a
comprehensive list.
- Solaris supports certifications by Sun and other vendors
- There are currently efforts underway to port to additional platforms

OpenSolaris is the open source version of the Solaris operating system and is equipped with the most

innovative technologies; these technologies will be inicluded in future releases of the Solaris OS.

The development of Solaris was open sourced in June 2005. You can observe and participate in the development

of OpenSolaris by going to www.opensolaris.org.

www.OpenSolaris.com provides access to Sun's binary OS distribution, based on the OpenSolaris source code

equipped with the latest technologies.

Initially released in January 2005, Solaris 10 is the latest long-term support release initially released January 2005.

The next Solaris OS long term support release, called Solaris Next, will be based on the OpenSolaris source code.
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Solaris began as SunOS 1.0 in 1982. In 1993 Sun bought out the UNIX license, which enabled only Sun to open
source Solaris. Read through the remaining milestones on this screen for a better understanding of the
background of Solaris and how it has become what is it today.
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OpenSolaris has open development processes and has helped Sun to venture into new markets.
Like Solaris, OpenSolaris is built on the three underlying technologies of virtualization, storage, and
clustering. These capabilities are easily leveraged by students, developers, and Web 2.0
deployments.

Sun has guaranteed binary compatibility from as far back as Solaris 2.3 and will continue with this
guarantee into the future. In most cases, even the SunOS 4 binaries will continue to run unchanged
on Solaris 10. In addition, Sun now guarantees that source code developed on one platform
architecture will compile and run on a different platform architecture.

We’ll pause here so you can read the additional features of the OpenSolaris and Solaris operating
systems displayed on this slide.
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Solaris OS milestone releases come out approximately every 3 to 5 years and are supported for a
minimum of 10 years. The most current milestone version is updated several times a year,
providing access to fixes, new hardware support, and/or additional new features from the upcoming
milestone version.

OpenSolaris OS updates come out approximately every 6 months. OpenSolaris updates are based
on the latest work in the codebase being developed by the OpenSolaris community. Future
releases of the Solaris OS will also be based on the OpenSolaris community codebase.

The Solaris Operating System life cycle, from when a milestone product version, such as Solaris
10, becomes widely available to when Sun stops broad support of that version, is at least ten years.
Updates that incorporate a set of tested, integrated patches along with new Solaris features and
support for new hardware are made available several times during the course of a release.
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This course will focus on the current features of both Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris and how these
ground-breaking technologies help customers meet their business objectives.

Many of the enhancements to Solaris tackle the issues businesses face in the areas of:
•Provisioning
•Virtualization
•High-Availability
•Application Performance and Observability
•Fault Management
•Data Management
•Security and Compliance

The succeeding course modules will discuss these topics in greater detail.
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Module 2 provides a list of the many websites you can visit to find information on provisioning.

In module 3, you will learn about the improvements to virtualization, including Server Virtualization,
Solaris Containers, Containers for Solaris 8, 9 and Linux, Resource Management, Sun Virtual
Solutions, Open Storage and Networking.

In module 4 you will learn about Solaris Cluster.

In module 5 you will learn about the Solaris performance improvements by way of technologies
such as Crossbow, Network Auto-Magic (NWAM) and Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace).

In module 6, you will learn about the added benefits of Predictive Self Healing, the Solaris Fault
Manager and the Solaris Services Manager.

In module 7, you will learn about the advancements in data management using ZFS.

In module 8, you will learn about the recent developments in Network Security, Encrypted
Communications, Trusted Extensions and Labeled Security.

Many of these features are only available in OpenSolaris. Future releases of the Solaris operating
system will include these advancements.
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It maybe useful to take a look at Solaris from a developer’s perspective. You can access a
presentation with this content using the link displayed on this slide.

This concludes the overview module. Please proceed to the next module, Provisioning, to access a
list of websites on this topic.