Friday, October 26, 2012

Solaris 11.1 available for download

Solaris 11.1 is now available for download from Oracle.

The usual SPARC/X86 [text|live|usb|AI] images are available as well as repository images. There are also pre-upgrade repository images available for those of you who are upgrading from 11/11 and have not upgraded to a recent SR or do not have a support contact.

Oracle Solaris 11 Download

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Solaris 11.1 announced

Solaris 11.1 have been announced and will be released later this month. It is the first update of Solaris 11 since it release november last year. It contains a few interesting features, I've only list a few, over 200 projects have integrated into this release.

General
  • New Virtual memory subsystem (VM2.0 or parts of it)
    Scales beyond 100TB, predicts and adapts to page demand, higher performance
  • RSyslog
  • USB3 support
  • Install on UEFI/4K
  • Interactive install on iSCSI
  • FedFS
Zones
  • Parallel zone update
  • Must faster LOFI
  • FS statistics per zone
  • Physical to virtual Solaris 10 migration
  • Better support for shared storage
  • Remote Administration Daemon
    Secure zone administration with C, Java, Python API
  • VNIC config in zone XML
  • Faster install and attach
Security
  • ASLR
  • OpenSCAP Security Compliance Checking and reporting tool
  • Audit remote server
Networking
  • Data Center Bridging (DCB) IEEE902.1Qaz
  • Link aggregation span across switches
  • VNIC migration
  • Edge Virtual Bridning (EVB) support
  • High performance SSH
X86
  • GRUB2
  • UEFI support
  • Improved hardware support
I asked the Solaris panel on Oracle Openworld about memory set for zones, it is not part of this release but might be implemented now that the initial part of VM2.0 is implemented.

Solaris 11.1 Whats's new

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

SPARC T5, M4 and SPARC64-X

Short summary of SPARC processor information that was disclosed at Oracle world, in the near future Oracle will release two different SPARC processors and Fujitsu will release a new SPARC64 processor with support for LDOM.

SPARC T5 (early next year)
  • 16 Cores 128 threads 
  • 28nm 
  • 25% increased thread performance to T4 
  • 2.5x throughput compared to T4 
  • Scales from 1 to 8 processors 
  • PCIe Gen 3 
  • 8MB L3 cache
  • LDOM virtualization (as with all previous T-series)
  • Solaris 10 update 11 or Solaris 11.1
SPARC M4 (next year)
  • 6 cores 48 threads 
  • Scales to 32+ sockets 
  • 48MB L2 cache 
  • 28nm 
  • 3.6GHz 
  • 5-6x performance per socket compared to M-series 
  • LDOM virtualization
  • 32TB+ memory configurations
  • Solaris 11 only (but S10 support in LDOM)
SPARC64-X
  • LDOM virtualization 
  • 16 cores 32 threads 
  • 24MB L2 Cache 
  • 3 GHz 
  • On Chip  DB floating point 
  • Crypto acceleration 
  • Runs both S10 and S11 in lab

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Oaktable world and OpenWorld 2012

I am attending both Oracle OpenWorld an ZFS Day/Oaktable world and will post updates as soon as I get some spare time or at the latest early next week.

It was great to talk and listen to the Joyent/Nexenta/illumos guys at Oaktable world.

Oaktable world
Oracle OpenWorld