I am currently developing a Java EE Application which will presumably run on the Glassfish v2.1 Application Server and PostgreSQL 8.4.
As we are currently extremely short in manpower (just me), I am looking for production platform solutions that require as little maintenance as possible to achieve high reliability and availability. The solution should also be able to scale evolutionary in little steps without any earth shattering big bang. So it should be a homogeneous operating system landscape (i.e. only one OS). The chosen operating system should not be required to change for as long as possible. This is why there should be support available for a very long time and the operating system should also be able to run on high-end hardware shoud the need for more reliable hardware occur later on (i.e. Sparc or Power CPUs, etc).
I do have some minor linux skills - but only to be able to care for my developer box. So I would have to learn practically everything from scratch anyway and I do not have to become an all-round admin wizard - I just need the skills required to set up and maintain this specific appliance like self-hacked setup.
This is why I would like to choose Solaris as the operating system. As Solaris 10 is four years old now and Solaris 11 is rumoured to be released mid 2010 and the first release of our software is planned to be in spring 2010, Solaris 11 might be more interesting than Solaris 10: This way, I would not have to migrate anytime soon from 10 to 11 and can already make use of Solaris 11 features in any scripts and installation configurations.
Sun claims that the next Solaris version will be derived from OpenSolaris 2009.6 and 2010.2, so I could use OpenSolaris as long as Solaris 11 is not available, as OpenSolaris seems to be fairly mature and tested and our JEE Application is not that mature at that time period anyway.
The remaining question I have (and that Sun obviously will not and can not answer as it is a guessing game) is:
Do you think that Opensolaris 2009.6 and later also 2010.2 can be regarded as a fairly advanced Solaris 11 Beta version? So it is the same relationship as between Fedora Core 6 and RHEL 5? I.e. will practically all Opensolaris features also be included at the first Solaris 11 release? Or will all my scripts break when they are migrated from OpenSolaris 2010.2 to Solaris 11, as there will be Features in Opensolaris 2010.2 that are not included in Solaris 11, like ZFS encryption, etc?
I am planning to develop an OpenSolaris automated install system with an install server and the client being installed in a VirtualBox machine for testing purposes and later one and more dedicated servers in production use installed using this procedure. Do you guess that this setup will break with Solaris 11?