Moving Confluence to Solaris under VMWare

As a proof of concept, yesterday I moved our Confluence installation to Solaris under VMWare from it's current home on a Linux box. I won't go into the background as to why I was doing this (most people would be shocked hearing I would move anything from Linux!) but the reason it was a proof of concept was the fact that Confluence isn't officially supported under VMWare.

A few points:

• There are lots of Solaris things I don't like after coming from Linux. Packaging first, and the tools it ships with (I want GNU grep and tar, dammit!)
• To allow an unprivileged user (our confluence user in this case) to bind to privileged ports (i.e. TCP < 1024), run this as root with the user logged out usermod -K defaultpriv=basic,net_privaddr confluence
• Use prstat, not top on Solaris
• When Atlassian says don't use Solaris' version of tar, they mean it. I spent about half an hour debugging only to find that Solaris had untarred the file incorrectly. Grrr.
• I love open formats and the *nix way. I did a mysqldump from our old server and found that our DB tables were using the MyISAM engine (not recommended by Atlassian), so I switched to InnoDB by a simple, quick sed through the dump. Brilliant. I love it.
• To stress test the application after the move I used siege, which worked a treat. It's probably packaged for your Linux distro too

Confluence seems to be running fine on the new VM and withstood my siege, it's only small (50 MB) so that might be a factor but it's worth testing if you need to make this move yourself.