Monday - September 10, 2007
Project eTude
Project eTude... I wish I was still working for The American Red Cross NHQ. Project eTude gives you the ability to create a Solaris 8 container within Solaris 10. At the ARC they have an extensive amount of solaris 8 machines. ( the ARC acronym is a no-no according to the style guide, but I don't work there anymore so pbpbpbt...) Man, they could get a pair of M5000s and replace probably all of their dev and train boxes. There is an issue of FDA compliance for the applications which would have to be addressed, but the cost savings would be worth the papoerwork/research headache in the long run.
Although it doesn't look like eTude is going to be entirely free. According to this sun source:
Unlike other virtualization technologies that may run an older OS without supporting it, Sun will fully support Solaris 8 applications running with the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant when the customer purchases a Solaris 8 Migration Services package, as well as the underlying Solaris support subscriptions.Hopefully it's a nominal fee. I suspect you can get the software for free, it's just the support calls that will cost you bucks. But being able to standardize on Sol 10 is pretty sweet. Everything is the same it seems except the uname output. Not too shabby.