The following key feature changes are related to storage and file systems management:
Device management – New commands are available and existing commands have been updated to help you locate storage devices by their physical locations.
Storage solutions – Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliance provides a low-cost storage solution and simplified administration with a browser-based management and monitoring tool. You use the appliance to share data between your Oracle Solaris 10 and Oracle Solaris 11 systems. As in Solaris 10 releases, data can be shared between your Oracle Solaris 10 and Oracle Solaris 11 systems by using the NFS protocol. In the Oracle Solaris 11 release, you can also share files between systems that are running Oracle Solaris and Windows by using the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol.
ZFS file system is the default file system – ZFS fundamentally changes the way file systems are administered in Oracle Solaris. ZFS includes features and benefits that are not found in any other file system that is available today.
The following features help you transition either your UFS file system or your ZFS storage pools to systems that are running an Oracle Solaris 11 release:
Migrate your UFS data with ZFS shadow migration – You can use the ZFS shadow migration feature to migrate your data from an existing file system to a new file system. You can either migrate a local file system to a new file system or migrate an NFS file system to a new local file system. See Transitioning an Oracle Solaris 10 System to an Oracle Solaris 11 Release.
Migrate your Oracle Solaris 10 storage pools – You can export and disconnect storage devices that contain ZFS storage pools on your Oracle Solaris 10 systems and then import them into your Oracle Solaris 11 systems.
Other ways to migrate your UFS data – You can remotely mount UFS file systems from an Oracle Solaris 10 system onto an Oracle Solaris 11 system. In addition, you can use the ufsrestore command to restore UFS data (ufsdump) into a ZFS file system.