The following zones enhancements have been made:
Improved install and attach performance – Installing a zone is 27 percent faster and attaching a zone is 91 percent faster. These performance improvements mean that a planned service window of a system with Oracle Solaris zones can be shorter because installing and updating Oracle Solaris zones is much faster.
Multiple boot environments supported on Oracle Solaris 10 branded zones – Multiple boot environments are supported on Oracle Solaris 10 branded zones. This change provides a greater degree of flexibility and safety for performing patching operations within an Oracle Solaris 10 environment that is running Oracle Solaris 11.
Parallel zone updates – A system that has multiple Oracle Solaris zones is updated in parallel. The increase in speed for updating 20 zones is in the 4x range.
Zone file system statistics – A per-fstype kstat (kernel statistic) for each zone is provided so that you can monitor file system activity in each non-global zone. In addition, a kstat is available for monitoring the global zone.
Zones on shared storage – You can simplify zones deployment, administration and migration by running the zones on arbitrary storage objects, for example, Fibre Channel devices or iSCSI targets. The shared storage feature enables you to transparently access and manage shared storage resources in zones. You can describe the corresponding shared storage resources in a host-independent format in the zone configuration.
For iSCSI targets, a URI type is used to describe the various storage devices that can be accessed through the iSCSI network-based storage protocol. See About Shared Storage Resources Using Storage URIs in Creating and Using Oracle Solaris Zones .
Zones installations that use the shared storage feature are encapsulated into dedicated ZFS storage pools that are hosted on shared storage devices. You can configure a device path directly with the zonecfg command. The zone is automatically encapsulated into its own ZFS storage pool. See Chapter 14, Getting Started With Oracle Solaris Zones on Shared Storage, in Creating and Using Oracle Solaris Zones .