An Oracle tool to migrate applications under Solaris 10 to 11.4

Migrating applications from Solaris 10 to version 11.4 of the operating system can be tricky in some cases for the companies that run them. The software, developed internally or by third-party publishers, works well as it is, but its source code is sometimes lost or the IT teams that installed it are no longer there to carry out the migration. Anyway Oracle, which develops and supports Solaris since the takeover of Sun Microsystems, now offers a solution to customers who use applications under Solaris 10 and want to switch to Solaris 11.4. Under the name of “sysdiff”, it is a Python script provided by the editor in the directory he dedicates to Solaris 11.4 on Github.

This tool “scans an area marked Solaris 10 [branded zone] database, finds binaries, libraries, modified data, and configuration files that are not part of Oracle Solaris 10 itself, and through a series of well-defined steps, an IPS package is created. This package can then be directly installed on an Oracle Solaris 11.4 system, ideally in a native or kernel zone,” the vendor explains in a blog post published in late April.

Integrated in Solaris 11.4 based on user feedback

After each step of the sysdiff tool, it is possible to intervene manually to adjust a list of files to be included in a package of third-party applications. Oracle says that while it’s not always guaranteed to work, its tests show there’s a good chance it will work, thanks to Solaris’ “binary guarantee” which ensures application compatibility of one version of the ‘OS to another. On this point, Oracle refers to its Stability section of its documentation. For now, sysdiff has simply been uploaded to Github and is not yet part of Solaris 11.4, underlines the supplier who specifies that its integration into the OS will largely depend on the way the tool is received and the comments users.

Also, sysdiff uses the Image Packing System pkg pull client, it must be run from a Solaris 11.4 host. For this reason, if the software to be migrated from Solaris 10 to 11.4 is running on a bare metal server, the installation system should first be migrated to a Solaris 10 branded zone using the flar command.