Wow, this is great news. If you didn't get the significance of this announcement, I guess I would need to remind you that Solaris Cluster is the best (I repeat the best) clustering product for any Unix or non-Unix platform (well, in my opinion anyway). Solaris Cluster features probably some of the best OS integration out there compared with other competing products (i.e Veritas Cluster Server, HP ServiceGuard, IBM HACMP) and I would put it at least one level above all of the existing competition. To sweeten the pill even further, Solaris Cluster is now free and open source! Forgetting all of the already outstanding merits of Solaris 10, I would use strictly Solaris and steer clear of the competition just on the basis that I can use Sun Cluster without worrying about licensing and paying hand over fist for VCS, MC/ServiceGuard, HACMP, or whatever RedHat concocted to sell high availability to its customers. Good on you Sun! Needless to say I'm stoked.

On a more technical note, judging by the official announcement release of Solaris Cluster Express can run on Solaris Express Community Edition build 86 or above, so you can enjoy all of bleeding edge features in the freshest Nevada builds and make them highly available. New features include:

• Support for exclusive-IP zones
• Support for Solaris 9 branded zones
• Oracle Data Guard based replication in Geographic Edition
• Support for PostgreSQL WAL shipping

Find download links and installation instructions here