Solaris 11.2 announcement - a collection of links (Part 1)

You may ask why Oracle made such a large fuzz around Solaris 11.2 … however a large load of new features found their way into this release. I just want to point you to some sources of information about all this new things.
There is a nice summary of all the new features: ORACLE SOLARIS 11.2 BETA – WHAT’S NEW. The most boring feature at first: Binary compatibility … all the new features … still you are able to run your application you’ve compiled last millennium. It’s a different question if you should do something like that, but the idea behind it is something different. Safe effort when moving forward to newer OS releases and newer application releases. When you have your own application, you don’t have to think if something has changed inside the OS. The second most boring feature, but extremely helpful: A Oracle DB prerequisite package … install it and you can directly install Oracle DB 12c on it with the graphical installer. Kernel Zones is a really great new features and now i can answer the question “Can i run different patch sets or different Solaris releases with zones with a resounding “Yes, when you use kernel-zones”. You find the documentation for this feature here. Unified Archive is extremely helpful to. Think of it as Flash Archives on steroids. Another frequently customer question i have a great answer now. You find the documentation of this feature at docs.oracle.com:

Unified Archives are a new native archive type for Oracle Solaris. Unified Archives enable multiple system instances to be archived in a single unified file format. Unified Archives may contain one or more archived instances of Oracle Solaris from a single host. You can select individual installed zones to include during archive creation, and the host itself is optional. You can deploy Unified Archives to recover a system that needs to be replaced due to failure, duplicate or clone a system configuration that you want installed on multiple machines, or migrate an existing system to new hardware or to a virtual system.

. However, there are much more features available and some of my colleagues have already written about it: Darren Moffat has two articles in his blog. On one side he is reporting about the new compliance reporting framework. One command to assess the compliance of a system to a set of compliance rules, one command to make a nice report out of it. Another small, but important new feature solved a problem that many admin had for quite some time: Herding changed to the /etc/system file. There is now a directory called /etc/system.d and the /etc/system is assembled out of the contents of the directory and the file. Content in the file wins if you define something twice. Bart Smaalders is writing about a nice addition in Solaris 11.1 called pkg exact-install:

It functions exactly as the install command does except that it behaves as if you're installing onto a blank system with respect to package tenancy - any installed packages not a direct or indirect dependent of the packages specified on the command line are removed. Note that configuration files, etc. on remaining packages are left alone just as if you used pkg install.

David Comay is giving a walkthrough for the admin panel and project panel of the Openstack integrated into Solaris 11.2. Nicolas Droux is reporting about “Application-Driven SDN and Beyond” talking about features like an build-in Elastic Virtual Switch (EVS), OpenStack Neutron Networking, VXLAN, the integration of probing in DLMP (YAY, one point of criticism away), Reflective Relay, Precision Time Protocol and (really, really interesting) SR-IOV VNICs in Solaris itself. Dan Anderson writes about verify boot

Verified Boot here refers to verification of object modules before execution using digial signatures. If enabled, Solaris Verified Boot checks the factory-signed signature in a kernel module before loading and executing the module.

Krishna Yenduri reports in his blog about SO_FLOW_SLA, a clever way set resource controls from within an application. In a second blog entry he is reporting about extensions to the configuration of network flows that were introduced with 11.0 but are now even more useful (i use it quite often to ensure the priority of ssh or other important interfaces to the system). More hints and links will follow soon.