Solaris 10 What's New

System Administration Enhancements

The following system administration features and enhancements have been added to the Solaris 10 6/06 release.

The Solaris ZFS File System

This file system enhancement is new in the Solaris 10 6/06 release.

This Solaris update release includes Solaris ZFS, a new 128-bit file system. Solaris ZFS provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. Solaris ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology. Rather, Solaris ZFS is a fundamentally new approach to data management.

Solaris ZFS uses a pooled-storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes. Thus, Solaris ZFS eliminates the associated problems of partition management, provisioning, and growing file systems. Thousands of file systems can all draw from a common storage pool. Each system consumes only as much space as actually needed. The combined I/O bandwidth of all devices in the pool is available to all file systems at all times.

All operations are “copy-on-write” transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. Every block has a checksum, so silent data corruption is impossible. In addition, the data is self-healing in replicated configurations. This feature means that if one copy is damaged, Solaris ZFS detects the damage and uses another copy to repair the damaged copy.

Solaris ZFS Easy Administration

For system administrators, the greatest improvement of Solaris ZFS over traditional file systems is the ease of administration.

Solaris ZFS takes a single command to set up a mirrored storage pool and file system. For example:


# zpool create home mirror c0t1d0 c1t2d0

The preceding command creates a mirrored storage pool named home and a single file system named home. The file system is mounted at /home.

With Solaris ZFS, you can use whole disks instead of partitions to create the storage pool.

You can use the /home file system hierarchy to create any number of file systems beneath /home. For example:


# zfs create home/user1

For more information, see the zpool(1M) and zfs(1M) man pages.

In addition, Solaris ZFS provides the following administration features:

For more information, see the Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

ZFS Web-Based Management

The Solaris 10 6/06 release includes the Solaris ZFS web-based management tool, which enables you to perform much of the administration that you can do with the ZFS command line interface. You can perform the following administrative tasks with the Solaris ZFS administration console:

You can access the Solaris ZFS administration console through a secure web browser at the following URL:


https://system-name:6789

If you type the appropriate URL and are unable to reach Solaris ZFS administration console, the server might not be started. To start the server, run the following command:


# /usr/sbin/smcwebserver start

If you want the server to run automatically when the system boots, run the following command:


# /usr/sbin/smcwebserver enable

Note –

You cannot use the Solaris Management Console (smc) to manage ZFS storage pools or file systems.


ZFS and Solaris Zones

The Solaris Zones partitioning technology supports Solaris ZFS components, such as adding Solaris ZFS file systems and storage pools into a zone.

For example, the file system resource type in the zonecfg command has been enhanced as follows:


zonecfg:myzone> add fs
zonecfg:myzone:fs> set type=zfs
zonecfg:myzone:fs> set dir=/export/share
zonecfg:myzone:fs> set special=tank/home
zonecfg:myzone:fs> end

For more information, see the zonecfg(1M) man page and the Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

Solaris Installation Tool Support of ZFS File Systems

This release supports the following Solaris installation tools:

New Solaris ACL Model

Solaris ZFS implements a new ACL model. Previous versions of the Solaris OS only supported an ACL model that was primarily based on the POSIX ACL draft specification. The POSIX-draft based ACLs are used to protect UFS files. A new model that is based on the NFSv4 specification is used to protect Solaris ZFS files.

The new ACL model :

The recently revised chmod(1) man page adds many new examples that demonstrate usage with Solaris ZFS. The acl(5) man page has an overview of the new ACL model. In addition, the Solaris ZFS Administration Guide provides extensive examples of using ACLs to protect ZFS files.

Predictive Self-Healing for x64 Systems

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris 10 6/06 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes a set of predictive self-healing features to automatically capture, diagnose, and respond to hardware errors detected on your system.

The Solaris Fault Manager now provides support for CPU and Memory errors detected on x64 systems, including:

The Solaris Fault Manager automatically diagnoses failures in x64 hardware. The Solaris Fault Manager also attempts to automatically offline or isolate a faulty CPU, cache, or DRAM memory region. Diagnostic messages are reported by the fmd daemon.

For more information about Fault Management in Solaris, see:

Predictive Self-Healing Support for SNMP Notification

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris 10 6/06 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes a set of predictive self-healing features to automatically capture, diagnose, and respond to hardware errors detected on your system. The self-healing diagnosis results are reported to the syslogd service.

The Solaris Fault Manager, fmd, now enables you to do the following:

The Fault Management MIB is located at /etc/sma/snmp/mibs/SUN-FM-MIB.mib on the Solaris system.

For more information about configuring SNMP on Solaris, see:

SunVTS 6.2

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris 10 6/06 release.

SunVTS (Sun Validation Test Suite) 6.2 is a comprehensive software diagnostic package that tests and validates Sun SPARC and x86 hardware. This feature verifies the configuration and proper functioning of controllers, devices, and platforms to validate the hardware.

SunVTS supports the following new hardware:

If executed on unsupported hardware, SunVTS stops execution and provides appropriate warning messages. This feature is an x86 enhancement for SunVTS.

For more SunVTS 6.2 documentation, see http://www.sun.com/documentation.

Common Agent Container

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris 10 6/06 release.

The Common Agent Container (CAC) is a stand-alone JavaTM program that implements a container for Java management applications. CAC provides a management infrastructure designed for the management functionality based on Java Management Extensions (JMXTM) and Java Dynamic Management Kit (JDMK). The SUNCacaort package installs the CAC software in the /usr/lib/cacao directory. Typically, CAC is not visible to the user or administrator.

Two occasions when an administrator might need to interact with the container daemon are:

For more information, see the Chapter 14, Troubleshooting Software Problems (Overview), in System Administration Guide: Advanced Administration.

iSCSI Logout Support

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris 10 6/06 release.

The iSCSI logout support feature allows a user to logout from an iSCSI target without rebooting the host. When a user tries to remove or disable a discovery method or address and the target is not in use, then the target logs out and cleans up all related resources. If the target is in use, then the discovery address or method remains enabled and the logical unit in use message is logged. This feature introduces a new behavior to safely log out of unused devices without rebooting the host.

The following commands can be use to apply this feature:

A user is no longer required to reboot a host when an attached iSCSI storage is removed from the host.

For further information, see the iscsiadm(1M) man page. See also the System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

iSCSI MS/T Support

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris 10 6/06 release.

The iSCSI Multiple session target (MS/T) support feature enables a user to create more iSCSI session or paths to a target as needed. The additional iSCSI paths provide higher bandwidth aggregation and availability in specific configurations. The iSCSI MS/T support feature should be used in combination with MPxIO or other multipathing software.

The new iscsiadm commands are:

The iSCSI MS/T support feature enables higher bandwidth aggregation and availability to the customers with iSCSI arrays that support login redirection.

For more information, see:

The logadm Utility

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris 10 6/06 release.

The logadm utility provides the -l option to rotate the logfile timestamps with local time. The -l option enables logadm to use the local time while naming files. This option does not change how timestamps are stored in log files.

For further information, see the logadm(1M) man page.

The volfsUtility

This enhancement to the volfs utility is new in the Solaris 10 6/06 release.

The volume management daemon, vold, is now managed by the Service Management Facility (SMF). This means you can use the svcadm disable command to disable the following new volfs service, if appropriate:


# svcadm disable volfs

You can identify the status of the volfs service by using this command:


$ svcs volfs
STATE          STIME    FMRI
online         Sep_29   svc:/system/filesystem/volfs:default

For more information, see the smf(5), volfs(7FS), and vold(1M) man pages.

For more information about managing the volfs service, see What’s New in Removable Media? in System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

Basic Registration 1.1

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris 10 6/06 release.

Basic Registration 1.1 enables you to create a registration profile and ID to automate your Solaris software registrations. The software registration user interface and the procedure for registering Solaris software has been changed in Basic Registration 1.1.

For more information about the software registration user interface changes and step-by-step instructions about how to register your Solaris software, see the Sun Connection Information Hub at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hubs/connection/.

Sun Update Connection

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris 10 6/06 release.

SunTM Update Connection System Edition is now known as Sun Update Connection. Sun Update Connection product supports the default patchadd behavior from a global zone on a system where one or more non-global zones are installed.

For more information about the Sun Update Connection suite of products, see http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/1320.2. See also the Sun Update Connection, System Edition 1.0 Release Notes.