In November last year, started releasing Solaris 11 Express, the development version eventually leading to the release of Oracle Solaris 11 which was released last week. Solaris is one of the assets which Oracle acquired from Sun in April 2009.
Solaris features so called container virtualization called Solaris Zones, which stands for virtualization on the OS level creating multiple isolated containers on a single server making sure applications do not conflict. Besides that Oracle also supports running Solaris on top of Oracle VM Server for x86 or SPARC based systems, the products providing hardware virtualization.
New features related to virtualization in this release:
- Support for Oracle Solaris 10 Zones, supporting running Solaris 10 environments within a Solaris 11 zone
- Zone P2V and V2V pre-flight checker providing information and identify any issues in advance
- Support for NFS in a non-global zone
- Exclusive-IP Zones by default, allowing assignment of a separate IP stack per zone
- Automatic VNIC Creation for Zones
- Administering of network flows to achieve bandwidth and priority control from within non global zones
- Delegated administration using Role Based Access Control (RBAC)
- Zone Boot Environments, which means that Boot Environments are also integrated with Oracle Solaris Zones. When a new boot environment is created, by cloning an existing one, the base boot environments zones are also cloned into this new boot environment. Also nested boot environments can be managed.
- Zone Dataset Layout improvements
- Immutable Zones, providing support for read-only file systems for non global zones using Mandatory Write Access Control (MWAC)
- Zoneadm can now shutdown zones cleanly
- Zonestat which can monitor system resources consumed by Oracle Solaris Zones
- Libzonestat library for use by 3rd party application developers
More changes to Solaris 11 can be found in the What’s new in Oracle Solaris 11 document