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What's New in the Solaris 9 9/04 Operating Environment

System Administration Tools

The Solaris 9 9/04 release provides enhancements to the Solaris Volume Manager. System administration features from prior releases include the following:

Multi-Owner Disk Set Support With Solaris Volume Manager for Sun Cluster

This feature is new in the Solaris 9 9/04 release.

Solaris Volume Manager for Sun Cluster introduces volume management features that work specifically with Sun Cluster and with applications such as Oracle9i Real Application Clusters. Solaris Volume Manager for Sun Cluster enables you to create and manage storage that is grouped into multi-owner disk sets. A multi-owner disk set enables multiple nodes to share ownership of a disk set. Multi-owner disk sets provide scalability because an instance of the application runs on each node in the cluster. Since each instance of the application directly accesses the shared storage, multi-owner disk sets also enhance the performance of the application.

For more information, see the Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide. For information on Sun Cluster, see http://www.sun.com/software/cluster/.

Expanded Disk Set Support in the Solaris Volume Manager

The feature is new in the Solaris 9 9/04 release.

The Solaris Volume Manager has expanded the functionality of device IDs. In addition to tracking movement in local sets, the Solaris Volume Manager now also automatically tracks disk movement within named disk sets. This device ID support also enables two hosts to share access nonconcurrently to disk sets, even with dissimilar views of accessible raw storage.

The Solaris Volume Manager has also been enhanced with the metaimport command. This command uses the expanded device ID support to enable you to import disk sets, even disk sets that were created on different systems.

See the metaimport(1M) man page for further information.

Top-Down Volume Creation in Solaris Volume Manager

This feature is new in the Solaris 9 4/04 release.

The top-down volume creation feature of Solaris Volume Manager provides a new command that enables system administrators to quickly and easily create quality of service-based Solaris Volume Manager configurations. Rather than manually partitioning disks, creating stripes, and assembling mirrors, the metassist command manages the details and provides functional logical volumes. The volumes are based on the criteria that are specified at the command line or in referenced configuration files.

For further information, see the Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide.

Signed Packages and Patches

This feature is new in the Solaris 9 12/03 release.

This Solaris release enables you to securely download Solaris packages and patches that include a digital signature by using the updated pkgadd and patchadd commands. A package or a patch with a valid digital signature ensures that the package or patch has not been modified after the signature was applied to the package or patch.

In previous Solaris releases, you could only add signed patches to your system if you used the Solaris patch management tools with PatchPro 2.1.

Additional software management features in this Solaris release include the following:

A signed package is identical to an unsigned package except for the signature. The package can be installed, queried, or removed with existing Solaris packaging tools. A signed package is also binary-compatible with an unsigned package.

Before you can add a package or patch with digital signatures to your system, you must set up a keystore with trusted certificates that are used to identify that the digital signature on the package or patch is valid.

For information about setting up the package keystore and adding signed packages or patches to your system, see the Adding and Removing Signed Packages (Task Map) in System Administration Guide: Basic Administration.

For information about booting and retrieving Solaris installation images from an HTTP or an HTTPS server, see WAN Boot Installation Method.

NIS-to-LDAP Transition Service

This feature is new in the Solaris 9 12/03 release.

The NIS-to-LDAP transition service can be used to enable a network transition from using NIS to using LDAP as the primary naming service. By using this transition service, administrators can utilize the bundled Sun ONE Directory Server, which works with LDAP naming service clients.

For further information, see the System Administration Guide: Naming and Directory Services (DNS, NIS, and LDAP).

BIND 8.3.3

This feature is new in the Solaris 9 8/03 release.

For this Solaris release, the version of BIND is 8.3.3. DNS clients can now connect to IPv6 DNS servers by using IPv6 transport.

Multiterabyte Volume Support in Solaris Volume Manager

Multiterabyte volume support is available only for systems that run a 64-bit kernel. This feature is new in the Solaris 9 4/03 release.

Solaris Volume Manager has been enhanced with multiterabyte volume support. With this support, the Solaris Volume Manager can create, manage, and delete large (>1Tbyte) RAID-0 (stripe), RAID-1 (mirror), RAID-5, and soft-partition volumes. In addition, this large volume support enables Solaris Volume Manager to construct volumes on large or EFI-labeled logical unit numbers (LUNs).

Solaris Volume Manager large volume support is not available for systems that run a 32-bit Solaris kernel. For example, systems that run the Solaris software (x86 Platform Edition) or the Solaris software with the SPARC 32-bit kernel cannot use large volume support.

For further information, see the Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide.

See also Multiterabyte Volume Support With EFI Disk Labels.

Reconfiguration Coordination Manager Support in Solaris Volume Manager

This feature is new in the Solaris 9 4/03 release.

Reconfiguration Coordination Manager (RCM) support adds to Solaris Volume Manager the ability to respond appropriately to dynamic reconfiguration (DR) requests. This addition ensures that removal of devices under Solaris Volume Manager control is blocked with an appropriate warning. This block remains in effect until the devices are no longer in use. This warning prevents system administrators from accidentally removing active volumes from a DR-configured system.

For further information, see the Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide.

Solaris Patch Update Feature

This feature is new in the Solaris 9 4/03 release.

You can use the Update option of the Solaris Management Console's Patches Tool to analyze, download, and install recommended patches from the SunSolve OnlineSM Web site. Or, the smpatch update command can be used for this purpose.

This Solaris update feature was previously only available for systems that run the Solaris 2.6, Solaris 7, or Solaris 8 releases.

You must install the PatchPro 2.1 software on your system before running the update feature. Download the PatchPro 2.1 packages from http://www.sun.com/patchpro. Then follow the instructions to install the software on your system.

For more information, see the smpatch(1M) man page.

Combine Data Address and Test Address for Single IP Network Multipathing Group

This feature is new in the Solaris 9 12/02 release.

The use of a dedicated test IP address for failure detection on single-adapter IP network multipathing groups is no longer required. Sometimes, failover is not possible because only one network interface card (NIC) is in an IP network multipathing group. In this situation, you can now combine the test address and the data address. The in.mpathd daemon uses a data address to detect failure when a test address is not specified.

For further information on Solaris IP multipathing, see the IP Network Multipathing Administration Guide.