×
Many organizations want to continue operating on SPARC-based applications but don’t want to continue using outdated physical SPARC hardware. Stromasys brings Charon-SSP, a SPARC emulator that mimics the behavior of SPARC hardware on a modern x86-based host or in the cloud, serving as an alternative when migrating away from any SPARC Server, physical or virtual (zone and/or LDOM), especially for legacy systems needing hardware emulation instead of typical hypervisors. This migration approach is best suited for businesses that want to retain the critical SPARC application integrity while minimizing downtime.
Legacy hardware forces IT teams to look backward instead of forward. It complicates hybrid cloud strategies and prevents consistent infrastructure management. Charon-SSP eliminates these barriers to modernization.
Yes. Charon-SSP allows multiple virtual SPARC instances to run on a single standard x86-64 server or within existing virtualization infrastructure.
There are significant benefits of SPARC virtualization in the cloud, such as cost-effectiveness, improved scalability, reduced downtime, and eliminated hardware failure risks. The SPARC virtualization enables the seamless deployment of multiple isolated Sun Solaris workloads on various virtual machines (VMs).
Charon-SSP from Stromasys is the game-changing emulation solution for outdated SPARC systems. It is a Solaris migration approach that uses the lift and shift strategy to move SPARC workloads into cloud environments like AWS, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure without application modifications. With cloud deployment, businesses can optimize their budget by eliminating additional hardware maintenance expenses and reducing operational costs. It will also improve scalability as resources can be easily adjusted more flexibly depending on the market demands.
The recent Charon-SSP 6.0 has exceptional features like MMU pass-through, efficient memory management, multi-core CPU support, and dynamic instruction features that boost performance to drive business growth and unlock potential opportunities. The legacy SPARC emulator, Charon SSP, is the bridge between preserving existing critical Solaris applications while leveraging the benefits of modern cloud platforms to drive innovations and ensure continuity.
The most popular SPARC emulators for running legacy software are Stromasys Charon-SSP, and SimICS. Charon SSP offers binary level compatibility with aging SPARC hardware and has the capability to support multiple Sun Solaris versions (including SunOS to Solaris 10 & 11 versions). It also offers support for Sun-4m, Sun-4u, and Sun-4v architectures for operational stability. Its design and performance makes it preferred choice for critical industries like aerospace, banking, and manufacturing. They help preserve their existing applications while leveraging modern platform benefits for business continuity.
QEMU is an open-source emulator which is freely available while Charon SSP ensures seamless operations of mission-critical legacy workloads requiring high compatibility and enterprise-grade support. Its reliability, low latency, and certified cloud-ready images allow direct deployment.
Charon SSP is available for both on-premises and cloud environment that gives flexibility to businesses to choose according to their business requirements.
Yes, advanced SPARC emulators like Charon SSP from Stromasys support dynamic instruction translation (DIT). The function of DIT is to optimize the runtime execution by translating SPARC instructions dynamically. This improves the operational performance and efficiency of SPARC workloads, especially on non-native hardware. These features allow the emulator to efficiently execute legacy binaries on modern CPUs. It converts the SPARC machine code into host machine instructions, which improves the execution speed and compatibility across various architectures. It even optimizes code execution efficiency, preserving SPARC application timing and stability.
“Lift and Shift” in SPARC migration refers to moving legacy Solaris workloads from the outdated traditional physical SPARC hardware to a modern platform without any modifications. These modern platforms can either be on-premises, like x86 servers, or cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Oracle Cloud, or more. The Charon-SSP replicated the environment of SPARC hardware on the modern platform to avoid any expensive rewrites and eliminate any aging hardware challenges or unplanned downtime to ensure seamless operations. The lift and shift approach ensures compatibility with storage, network, and OS configurations identical to the legacy system for operational stability and continuity. It is a cost-effective legacy modernization approach that preserves the existing investments while leveraging the benefits of modern platforms.
Yes, Stromasys Charon-SSP emulator supports multiple virtual CPUs to leverage multi-core physical hosts. It allows you to configure a Charon-SSP instance with several emulated SPARC CPUs for virtual machines that are matched to the host system’s cores, enabling parallel processing of legacy workloads. This allocation of one host CPU per virtual SPARC processor gives optimal results and avoids performance bottlenecks due to shared resources. This multi-CPU support is exceptionally beneficial for migrating the multi-threaded enterprise applications like Oracle Databases or SAP workloads. By emulating SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) environments, Charon-SSP ensures both scalability and integrity of complex business systems.
Stromasys offers a suite of tools and services for helping the migration of legacy systems. Stromasys brings the Charon SSP emulation solution to modernize the aging SPARC hardware.
Its comprehensive migration suite includes assessment tools for legacy environment analysis, conversion, and deployment. However, Stromasys even provides migration consulting, cloud onboarding service, and data transfer utilities between physical and emulated modern alternatives for outdated SPARC systems. Charon-SSP cloud images are also available for streamlined cloud deployment. Dedicated integration support is available for cloud environments hosted on Azure, AWS, or VMware to ensure smooth transitions with minimal downtime. Also, Stromasys offers robust assistance for installation, licensing, and optimization throughout the migration process.
Charon-SSP uses different types of licensing accordingly to the hosting environment to best suiting all customer needs. Charon-SSP uses a Sentinel HASP key-based licensing module, which is combined with a valid digital license file. Licensing can be local or remote across Windows and Linux management interfaces. Each license corresponds to the configuration of a specific emulated SPARC system model and CPU count. While using a USB license key for the Sun SPARC hardware, it is mandatory to connect the Charon USB HASP license key to the host system permanently. This helps in preserving the customer-specific license parameters. In Cloud environments, we can use a “Virtual Environment License Server” that allows to exploit the more flexible and dynamic possibilities of these infrastructures.
You can run Charon-SSP on multiple platforms as it supports a wide range of host environments. It supports 64-bit Linux distributions like Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Rocky Linux. It can also integrate seamlessly with hypervisors like VMware ESXi, Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Linux KVM. Microsoft Windows can be used for management tool purposes.
You also have an alternate option of operating natively on cloud environments like AWS, OCI, Google Cloud, and Azure. You need your system to meet the virtualization requirements. Here, you will need to run the fully emulated SPARC system within the virtual machine instance to achieve a similar operational behavior as you would on an on-premises system. You will also need to ensure cross-environmental compatibility for business continuity. However, emulation options for certain advanced versions require bare-metal hosts with specific CPU capabilities.
The typical host requirements for the Charon SSP include a modern x86-64 CPU (Intel Haswell v3 or newer, or comparable AMD with specific processor, memory, and OS specifications to ensure stable and performant SPARC emulation). The other recommendations for configurations include:
Recommended Processor and Cores
Memory Requirements
Host Operating System
Virtualization and Hypervisor Support
Other Recommendations
These host requirements are essential for seamless Charon SSP but can be tailored based on specific workload and system demands.
Charon-SSP 6.0 is the latest version, featuring MMU pass-through technology, which helps businesses achieve performance on the cloud comparable to that previously attainable only on-premises.
Stromasys provides ongoing support for your modern Solaris environment. This replaces the expensive and hard-to-find legacy hardware support with modern, reliable service.
Migration eliminates technical debt that resists other remediation efforts. It enables consistent infrastructure strategies across your entire IT estate. No more exceptions that complicate data center operations.
It integrates with cloud storage and backup solutions. Also supports virtual tape devices, snapshots, and automated backup workflows for reliable data protection and long-term archival.
Using a SPARC hardware emulator, you can efficiently run your Solaris SPARC system on Linux. It recreates the original Sun SPARC environment on a modern x86 server or virtual machines (VMs) while keeping your existing Solaris OS and applications unchanged. The process involves installing an emulator on a Linux host, configuring virtual SPARC instances like Sun4m, Sun4u, or Sun4v. Then you can migrate your Solaris operating system and workloads from the original SPARC systems to the new modern environment.
Solaris OS Version Support
Charon SSP offers support for all critical Solaris versions:
Using this approach, you can preserve your SPARC server workloads that cannot be rewritten or replaced. This will give you the advantages of Linux ecosystems while leveraging the benefits of the modern environment, while eliminating the physical SPARC server without any operational disruptions.
