For existing customers, this section highlights the key changes in this release:
Oracle Solaris Elastic Virtual Switch (EVS) feature – Oracle Solaris network virtualization capabilities are expanded to enable managing virtual switches directly. The Oracle Solaris Elastic Virtual Switch feature provides virtual networking infrastructure within a data center or a multitenant cloud environment to interconnect virtual machines that reside on multiple servers. Virtual machines connected to the same elastic virtual switch can communicate with each other. EVS enables centralized management of virtual switches on multiple hosts and hence VNICs connected to the elastic virtual switch. For more information, see Chapter 5, About Elastic Virtual Switches. For more information about how to administer elastic virtual switches, see Chapter 6, Administering Elastic Virtual Switches.
Support for Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN) – Oracle Solaris supports the VXLAN technology that provides isolation methods to support virtualization in large data centers. It enables migration of virtual machines between physical servers belonging to different Layer 2 networks in a cloud environment. For more information, see Chapter 3, Configuring Virtual Networks by Using Virtual Extensible Local Area Networks.
Support for Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) – This feature enables the creation of a virtual function (VF) based VNIC on a network device that supports SR-IOV. For more information, see Using Single Root I/O Virtualization With VNICs.
Temporarily creating virtual network interface cards (VNICs) in zones – You can create temporary VNICs directly in a non-global zone from a global zone. You must use the –t option with the dladm create-vnic command to create a temporary VNIC. Temporary VNICs persist until the next reboot of the zone. In addition to temporarily creating VNICs, you can also temporarily create VLANs and IP over InfiniBand (IPoIB) partitions in zones. For more information, see How to Temporarily Create VNICs in Zones.
Communication between VNICs by using an external switch – With the Oracle Solaris 11.2 reflective relay feature, the traffic between the local Oracle Solaris zones or Oracle VMs sharing the same underlying physical NIC can be forced to be always sent to the physical network instead of the host virtual switch. Communication between these entities is subject to policies configured on the external switch that support the reflective relay feature. For more information, see Controlling Switching Between VMs Over the Same Physical Port.
Enhancements for monitoring network traffic statistics – You can use the enhanced dlstat and flowstat commands to effectively monitor network traffic statistics. The enhancements for monitoring network traffic statistics are:
Network traffic statistics are displayed with the current time.
Network traffic statistics are displayed and refreshed based on the specified interval and count values.
Network traffic statistics are displayed in rates per second based on the specified interval value.
For more information about the enhancements, see Displaying Network Traffic Statistics of Network Devices and Displaying Network Traffic Statistics of Flows.
Flows configuration changes – You can use the enhanced flowadm add-flow command to configure flows on a datalink based on an additional number of attributes and their newer combinations, which help you to selectively organize network packets that are received from different ports, transport protocols, and IP addresses. For more information, see Managing Network Resources by Using Flows.
In addition to the bandwidth property used for managing flows, you can use the flowadm set-flowprop command to set the priority property for flows. You can prioritize flows by setting the priority property. The new read-only property, hwflow, enables you to see how a flow is instantiated. For more information, see Configuring Flows.
Displaying multiple MAC addresses associated with VNICs – You can use the enhanced dladm show-vnic command to display multiple MAC addresses associated with VNICs. For more information, see Displaying VNICs With Multiple MAC Addresses.
System-created VNICs – In addition to the VNICs that you can create by using the dladm create-vnic command, the system also creates VNICs, which are called system-created VNICs. For more information, see Commands for Configuring the Components of a Virtual Network.
Displaying physical and virtual link state of datalinks – You can use the dladm show-phys and the dladm show-ether commands to display the physical link state of datalinks. To display the virtual link state of a datalink, you can use the dladm show-link command. For more information, see Displaying the Physical and Virtual Link State of Datalinks.
Displaying effective value of the datalink properties – The dladm show-linkprop command is enhanced to display the EFFECTIVE field for datalink properties. The values for the EFFECTIVE field is determined by the system based on the availability of the resource, capability of the underlying device, or negotiations with the peer. The effective value need not be the same as the configured values. A datalink property can have an effective value, even though the property is not configured with a value.