Did you ever wish you could get the industrial strength power of UNIX/RISC with the flexibility of cloud computing?  Well, now you can!  With recent advances from Oracle it's possible to build an incredibly high-performance, flexible, available virtualized infrastructure based on Solaris and SPARC.  Here's the recipe!

Authored in collaboration across the Oracle "Systems Group" team, we now have a complete best practice guide for you.  Click below to download it:

Best Practices for Building a Virtualized SPARC Computing Environment

Inside you'll find recommendations for how and when to leverage technologies like:

• SPARC T4
• OVM for SPARC hypervisor (version 2.2 and newer)
• Solaris 11
  
• Ops Center 12c
• ZFS Storage Appliance
• Oracle network switches

Based on following these best practices, you'll be able to construct a dynamic, virtualized infrastructure that allows for:

• Easy, GUI-based provisioning on new VMs
• Automated HA failover in the event of physical server failures
• Automatic load balancing across a cluster of VM hosts
• Complete end-to-end monitoring

You should download this paper and check it out.  Even if you aren't planning on buying all new hardware, and instead want to transform some existing gear into a dynamic virtualized environment then this paper will give you concrete info on what to do and the trade-offs you'll make.

Have fun getting started on your journey to build a SPARC cloud!