As a dev shop we have a number of ancient ultrasparc systems running Solaris 8 and 9 which we use as build hosts. I'm wondering what it takes to consolidate these machines as legacy containers onto say a used T5140 running Solaris 11. As long as I already have the Solaris 8 and 9 systems, are there any additional license cost for the legacy container functionality?
Can I still run Solaris 11 for free, or will such a setup count as "production" use?
First thing to note is that Solaris8 and Solaris9 branded zones are no longer supported in Solaris 11. You can create a native Solaris10 zone on your Solaris 11 system but you cannot create zones within that zone. (ha!, zones within zones, that would have been neat, wouldn't it?)
So to create something cost efficient you'll have to combine the use of LDOMs and Zones. What you do is that you take your SPARC box and partition it into two LDOMs as below:
LDOM1 (running Solaris 10)
LDOM2 (running Solaris 11)
Bingo! This gives you build hosts for each of Solaris 8, Solaris 9, Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 all on single piece of hardware.
As for your question about license cost for Solaris 10 or Solaris 11. If you read the Solaris OTN license (the one that doesn't cost you money) you'll see that it says that under this license you may use Solaris:
...only for the purpose of developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating your applications, and not for any other purpose.
You are saying that these are build hosts and I take it that they are not used for any other purpose than software development and test. Now, with the usual IANAL disclaimer and all sorts of other disclaimers, I would say that your use case clearly falls within those limits meaning that, yes, you can use the OTN license. In conclusion: the suggested setup shouldn't cost you additional money compared to your current situation.
