Read and write bandwidth limits in ZFS

Especially in environments with loads competing for the same resources (like using disk space on the same array) it can be useful to limit the ability of an application to...

useradm

Solaris 11.4 has a new tool to ease the administration of user accounts. It’s called useradm. It can be used to add,modify, delete and list users themself and the configuration...

ZFS top-level vdev removal - revisited

I would like to give you some additional information about the top-level device removal. Other than stated by me in my last blog entry or the documentation you can't do...

pfiles

There are two nice changes to the pfiles tool. Sometimes it’s really useful to know what files were open when a process threw a core dump. With Solaris 11.4 pfiles...

Clearer versioning in packages.

Since Oracle (or at that time Sun) introduced the the new packaging system in Solaris Express and later Solaris 11, the version string was a little bit strange. root@togusa:~# pkg...

How to remove a top-level vdev from a ZFS pool

Over the years I did many, many presentations. Whenever talking with the customers afterwards about what they would like to see in ZFS, there was one feature that was always...

Give the route a name

With Oracle Solaris 11.4 you are now able to give routes a name, thus making easier to refer to them in the route command. Let’s create a route in the...

How to use the Oracle Database Sheet in Solaris 11.4

My colleague Joost wrote a great article explaining how to use the Database Sheet (the feature i wrote about a few days ago) and how it looks: "Discover the New...

NFSv3 over TCP

When reading the headline, you may think “What? This works for years now”. Well, you are right. You can do NFS over TCP. There was just a small problem before...

DTrace on ... what ??? Err, DTrace on Windows

Very interesting news about one of my favorite features in Solaris for years as i’m doing a lot of performance work at customers. Microsoft has actually implemented DTrace for Windows....

Configuring auditing for select files in Oracle Solaris 11.4

Besides finding performance problems on customer systems, one of my favorite topics is security. Thus I’m talking a lot with customer how to implement something in Solaris in relation to...

Adding datasets to running zones

Sometimes you need to have a new ZFS dataset in your zone because, you want to install a new application or a new instance of an application in it which...

A brief history of the admins time

Again a rather short entry. Quite often one question is which privileged tasks the admins did on the system. Since 11.4 there is a simple command to find out. The...

Periodic scrubs revisited

There were a number of questions how you control at which time you do a scrub, as some considered it as a bad idea to start a scrub during business...

You don't always see what you want (... and how you configure it in Solaris)

Consider the following situation: You are tasked to update an application, to stop it, to start it, to change it’s configuration. You need access to the config files, to the...

11.4.6.0, the number of the SRU

This days blog entry is only a short one. It’s a feature from the “at last”-department. Until Solaris 11.4 it always uncessary indirect to find out which SRU you are...

Labeled Sandboxes

One of the reasons why I was that silent here the last year even when Solaris 11.4 was introduced was the situation, that my colleague Detlef Drewanz and I created...

Periodic scrubs of ZFS filesystems

It was and is always a best practice to do regular scrubs of your ZFS filesystems in order to ensure that all checksums … well … check out to ensure...

Memory Reservation Pools in Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU1

There is a rare sitation that prohibits you to boot or reboot a Kernel Zone. In order to happen, you need to have a massively loaded system and a lot...

Filesystem latencies with fsstat.

After my blog entry about showing latencies at disk level, I want to highlight another tool that is now able to display latencies, just somewhat up the layers (or layer,...