Solaris 10 10/09 Released

Sun released Solaris 10 10/09 with many new and enhanced features. Highlights include:

System Administration Enhancements

Two-Terabyte Disk Support for Installing and Booting the Solaris OS
pcitool Utility
ZFS Features and Changes: ZFS and Flash installation support; Setting ZFS user and group quotas; Using ZFS ACL pass through inheritance for execute permission; Using cache devices in your ZFS storage pool; ZFS property enhancements (like properties to control the behavior of the ARC and the L2ARC); ZFS log device recovery; ZFS ACL Sets
nss_ldap shadowAccount Support
Sun Validation Test Suite 7.0 Patch Set 6

Installation Enhancements

Turbo-Charging SVR4 Packaging

System Resources Enhancements

Zones Parallel Patching
PVIO Drivers in Solaris 10 Guest Domains

Device Management Enhancements

iSCSI Initiator SMF Service
LSI 6180 Controller Support in Solaris MPxIO

System Performance Enhancements

Callout Subsystem Scalability

Driver Enhancements

Driver for LSI MPT 2.0-Compliant SAS2.0 Controllers
x86: Broadcom NetXtreme II Gigabit Ethernet Driver
x86: Interrupt Remapping Support for Intel Vt-d
x86: SATA Tape Devices Supported by the AHCI Driver
Sun StorageTek 6Gb/s SAS PCIe RAID HBA Driver
Intel 82599 10Gb PCI Express Ethernet Controller
Intel 82598 10Gb PCI Express Ethernet Controller

Freeware Enhancements

NTP Version 4.2.5
PostgreSQL 8.1.17, 8.2.13, and 8.3.7
Samba 3.0.35

As noted above, Solaris 10 now provides a new automated framework for installing patches in single user mode, parallel patch installation of virtualized Solaris Containers, and significant speedups for SVR4 package installation, allowing system installations or upgrades to be up to four times faster than before, Sun reports.

The latest release of Solaris ZFS in Solaris 10 10/09 integrates the ability to use solid-state Flash drive technology for data caching and high volume transactional applications, and it allows administrators flexibility in setting usage limits in several ways, including by individual file system, user or group.

Enhanced Solaris power management capabilities leverage the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, boosting energy efficiency by adjusting processor power on-demand in response to system utilization. The Solaris Power Aware Dispatcher automatically monitors and optimizes a company's system to maximize performance while minimizing power consumption and can utilize Intel's Deep C-States technology to significantly reduce power consumed by idle cores.

"With Solaris 10 10/09, installation, update and patch features have been enhanced to simplify system administration and reduce cost. In addition, Solaris ZFS has been updated to integrate Flash technology, the next revolution in storage hardware, into the operating system," summarized Jim McHugh, vice president, Datacenter Marketing, Sun. "Solaris provides customers with a greater degree of flexibility, while its new features deliver the best performance and power efficiency on systems using the latest SPARC, Intel and AMD processors."

In anticipation of the merger with Oracle, Sun pointed out that there are more Oracle database deployments on the SPARC/Solaris combination than any other OS, as well as over 11,000 third-party products and customer applications optimized for Solaris. At the Oracle OpenWorld conference set for October 11-15, 2009, in San Francisco, Sun plans on demonstrating some of these latest innovations in the Solaris OS, virtualization, and advanced data services and security for Oracle applications.

More Information

Solaris 10 10/09 Release and Installation Collection - Documentation

What's New - Documentation

Release Notes

Features Removed From the Solaris 10 Operating System as of the 10/09 Update 8 release

Download

Solaris 10 Upgrade Resources for System Administrators

ZFS Resources for System Administrators

Solaris Product Page [...read more...]

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