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

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

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

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

Oracle forces wesunsolve to close

In another blow against the community and the people who work with or/and have interest in their products Oracle now has forced wesunsolve.net to close.

In the last two years it has been of tremendous value for administrators who find their support site hard to navigate and the a good overview of patches and updates.

I see nothing Oracle can gain by doing this, no patches where available only metadata with links to their own support site for downloads ( if you have an account with access to the patches ).

Since they already done a much, much worse thing by closing the OpenSolaris source this comes as no surprise. The way companies treat innovation and community efforts are important when you chose a operating system or database engine. Tell your sales representative what you think about these things.

A huge thanks to the people who put time and effort into making wesunsolve.net, it was very useful and will be missed.

wesunsolve.net

Solaris 10 10/12 and T5-8

Oracle keeps quiet about upcoming Solaris release and their features. I've however figured out the name (and planned release month) for the possibly last Solaris 10 update. It seems like s10u11 will be named Solaris 10 10/12 indicating a October release.

Not much is known about this release more than that it will probably feature a ZFS tech refresh, fully integrate OCM and live upgrade enhancements. It could possibly also support the new T5 processors since they might be quite similar to the current T4 processors except for the doubling of cores.

I have also seen fragments of information indicating that Oracle was running Solaris 11 Update 1 on SPARC T5-8 machines as early as March.

Upcoming SPARC CPUs

The upcoming Hot Chips symposiums "Big iron" session will feature two future SPARC processors:

"SPARC64 X; Fujitsu’s new generation 16 core processor for the next generation UNIX servers

16-core SPARC T5 CMT Processor with glueless 1-hop scaling to 8-sockets"

The SPARC T5 is expected to be built using 28nm technology and double the number of cores compared to the current T4 processor. The Sun Oracle server line should also include a 8 processor version, T5-8 which will then be have four times the number of cores (128) compared to the current T4-4 (32).

This session will be held August 29, hopefully more information will surface afterwards. Otherwise it would be a safe bet to say that we will know more about the SPARC T5 after Oracle OpenWorld in October.

The Register has an article about both the T5 and the M4: Drilling into Oracle's performance boasts.