For existing customers, this section highlights the following key changes in this release:
Private virtual local area networks – Oracle Solaris 11.3 includes support for private virtual local area networks (PVLANs), as defined in the RFC 5517 standard. You can use a PVLAN to divide a regular VLAN (primary) into sub-VLANs (secondary). For more information, see Overview of Private VLANs.
Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) data center bridging exchange (DCBX) – Oracle Solaris 11.3 includes support for Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) data center bridging exchange (DCBX) in addition to IEEE so that Oracle Solaris Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FcoE) can be deployed in environments with a diverse set of switches when using data center bridging (DCB). Oracle Solaris CEE DCBX supports priority-based flow control (PFC) and Application type-length-value (TLV). For more information, see Setting the Mode of Operation for DCB.
VLAN-aware kernel zones and dynamic MAC addresses and VLAN IDs – Starting with Oracle Solaris 11.3 SRU 6, you can create VNICs to be on a VLAN of a Oracle Solaris kernel zone in addition to the VNICs that can be created inside a kernel zone. These VNICs are a part of the same L2 broadcast domain as that of a kernel zone. For more information, see Using VLANs With Kernel Zones.
Also, you can specify prefixes of allowed MAC addresses and ranges of allowed VLAN IDs to enable the kernel zone to communicate to the global host when the values of MAC address and VLAN IDs that the kernel zone needs to use are priorly not known. For more information, see Using Dynamic MAC Addresses and VLAN IDs in Kernel Zones.