Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

For now, anyway.

Last week came and went. The "big announcement" was purely hardware, no change on the Solaris licensing front.

That said, the Sun Fire X4800 looks interesting, though there's no pricing information. We have a bunch of X4600's doing jobs they really aren't suited to -- they make lousy database servers without external storage, yet that's what they're doing -- and if the X4800 comes in at a similar price it'd be much better in that sort of role where you need lots of CPU, reasonably-fast storage, but not a huge amount of it.

I have a need to run Solaris in a virtual machine. Do you think I can find out how much it'll cost to license the operating system?

Nope. Oracle now require that you buy a support contract in order to obtain a license. They do not appear to publish the price of such a contract anywhere, at least not anywhere I can find it, like in the Sun products catalogue, or the Oracle price list. Trying to use Google to answer the question just finds a lot of people asking the same thing.

Last time I asked our reseller he couldn't tell me. I'm trying that again, this time with multiple resellers. But I'm not holding my breath.

Anyone would think they don't want our money.