Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Solaris 10 Update 6 wishlist

With only about two month left (lets say three) to the next update of Solaris 10, it would be interesting to know which changes will be incorporated in this release. All i have seen so far is that it will contain a large ZFS update including boot. I have made a little wish list with a few needed enhancements that probably could be part of it:

Zone update on attach (PSARC/2007/621)
Attach/dettach between sun4u and sun4v (6480464)

This will make life a lot easier for us that have deployed large amounts of zones, making it easier to move and make incremental updates to zones. Today a zone must be upgraded/patched together with a global zone, with update on attach you could have a move zones to a already upgraded node and attach them, one by one, thereby minimizing total downtime per zone. This can be quite handy in a environment with 20+ zones per node (live upgrade is not always a option).

This one i am not so sure will make it, but we can always hope for the best and prepare for the worst ;)

Network Vanity naming (PSARC 2006/499)

Vanity naming would be great for moving detached zones to a new host, today you will have to change the zone configuration if the new host have another NIC or the NIC configured differently. With vanity naming the zone could just bind to the names public and backup instead of e.g. bge3 and bge8.

And a long standing bug fix would also be greatly appreciated:

6637869 zone attach doesn't handle obsolete patches correctly

I've had problems with this bug when moving zones from a upgraded Solaris 10U4 to a freshly installed S10U4, a clean attach will currently not work.

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