Just thought I’ll take a few minutes to welcome you to the new year and to thank you once again for staying with the Solaris Blog for so long!

My plans for this blog are quite humble in the view of Solaris not being a primary Unix-like OS at work anymore, but I’m still quite curious about a few things and would gladly share knowledge and answer your questions to my best ability.

So far, the following topics appear to be most useful:

• Anything to do with SSH (stay tuned and take a minute to become RSS reader of my Unix Tutorial blog – I plan on releasing an SSH eBook later this year which many of you will find useful) – yes, it will cover passwordless SSH and will have some of the best X11 forwarding recipes
• DTrace tips – still my favorite from Solaris 10 times, DTrace is truly amazing. I’m both surprised and glad that it made its way into many other operating systems. If anything, I’ll be sharing occasional tips on DTrace in Mac OSX. I will assume you’ve all seen Brendan Gregg’s excellent DTrace Tools kit!
• ZFS – this proved to be so useful and revolutionary at the time that ZFS can now be found in a number of appliances and OS distros for NAS storage management (hello ZFS Build, Nexenta and Zena Box!)

I plan to expand sections of the blog covering these topics, but will gladly add anything you may find useful enough to flag in the comments section.

I’m really looking forward to 2012, and hope there will be more than one occasion when you will find my tips useful and readily applicable. Talk soon!

• more money to develop SPARC
• more money to develop Solaris
• dramatic improvement in Sun’s hardware performance through tight integration with Oracle software

I’ve seen many comments from existing Sun employees and the message above is seen as both strong and very positive. Hope this brings Sun Microsystems better days, it’s a great company with amazing people.

Frontline Systems is one of Australia’s leading experts on Solaris OS, and they’re now giving Solaris fans a chance to win one of the following prizes:

• 5 Google Android powered HTC Dream Smart Phones
• 5 BOSE around-ear headphones
• 500 Solaris is IT t-shirts

Sadly, the competition is running for Australia residents only, but if you’re based there – this your chance to share your thoughts and get something for it.
Here’s what Frontline Systems ask of you:

As the world’s most reliable, scalable and secure OS, Solaris 10 delivers tangible benefits to all IT professionals. We want to know how Solaris 10 makes a difference to your work. Is it the reduced costs or the record-breaking performance? What about the staggering scalability and advanced security?

Tell us why you think Solaris is IT today, in 250 words or less, and be in for a chance to win!

Please visit this link to enter the competition (I assure you, this is not an affiliate link – it’s just too long so I shortened it).

What’s new in Solaris 10 update 7?

• ZFS support when cloning a Solaris zone – quite a useful tool for someone who always copied the files of Solaris zones. I personally did similar cloning myself, but it’s handy that now ZFS cloning is supported in the zoneadm command itself.
• IPsec – SMF services – Service Management Framework now manages all the necessary IPsec functionality with traditionally thorough approach: interface consistency, restarting anf fault-tracking are all provided. SMF services for IPsec are: ipsec/policy, ipsec/ike, ipsec/manual-key and ipsec/ipsecalgs.
• SunSSH with OpenSSL PKCS#11 Engine support – this opens way for more optimal use of hardware crypto accelerators.
• iSCSI Target improvements – greatly improved iSNS (Internet Storage Name Service) support, updates for improved interoperability. Most common iSCSI initiators are now supported
• NetXen 10-GigE driver – a new NIC driver called ntxn will make it possible to use 10-Gigabit cards on your x86 platform
• New locale support – greetings go to Kazakhstan and Ukraine which are now fully supported

This isn’t a full list of improvements, so if you’re interested in all the details – please read the official What’s New in Solaris 10 update 7 doc.

Solaris 10 u7 screenshots gallery

I’ve uploaded a few screenshots for you, nothing revolutionary but will still give you an idea if you have never seen Solaris 10 before:

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

See also:

• What’s new in Solaris 10
• Solaris 10 zones: part one
• What is Solaris Express
  

DTrace – dynamic tracing

DTrace allows you to dynamically trace anything and everything in real time. You can observe processes both in userland and kernel space, watch them as closely as you want and this all with virtually no performance impact. This allows DTrace to be used on a production system being absolutely sure it’s not going to considerably slow the system down or crash it.
I think it’s one of the best Solaris 10 innovations – all the administrators and developers will like it.

ZFS file system (zettabyte file system)

This is a new filesystem – it promises to put an end to all the standard troubles every system administrator has with file systems. By introducing a virtual storage pool, you will be able to grow or shrink file systems much easier by simply adding new physical disks to this pool. The same storage pool is going to be used for all the filesystems you need – so, having added 10 more physical disks to the pool, you’ll be able to decide which filesystems you want to grow.

Predictive Self-Healing (PSH)

PSH is a set of automated diagnostics, isolation and recovery procedures for most of the hardware and software faults which might occur on your system. In case of hardware failure, PSH will be able to safely isolate the faulty part and notify all the hardware and software resources which might be dependant on this faulty part.

PSH has few components. Someday I’ll write more on it, but in short – here’s how it works: mst of the work is done by Solaris Fault Manager (SFM) and Solaris Service Manager (SSM).

SFM is watching the hardware – if it find a faulty processor, a bad memory region or some faulty I/O device, it will automatically isolate the part before it fails completely and provokes a system crash or some other failure.

SSM in its turn is looking after all the applications – all the daemons are started as services, and with just few commands you can get their status, restart them or set up logical dependancies between them.

For instance, a telnet service will be dependant on the basic network services – the ones which configure network interfaces. Because of the dependancies, if system interfaces weren’t configured on boot-up, the appropriate service will not be in online state and this will make dependant telnet service to fall into the maintenance mode, waiting for the necessary network services to come online. It all sounds rather complicated (and it actually is!), but if you properly configure everything, it works together fairly well.

Network performance

There was a lot of stuff rewritten in TCP/IP stack and this allowed Solaris 10 to reach a much better performance.
One of the main achievements is the linear scalability on multi-processor systems. All the latest network technologies are obviously supported as well. The project name for these improvements is FireEngine, and I’ll probably try and find some links to the pages related to it.

Janus – Linux environment running on Solaris

It is promised that you’ll be able to run many Linux applications on Solaris systems. Practically, this feature allows you to run any native Linux application without any changes to it or any reboots, with the performance almost as good as original. To make this work, you’ll have to free up some spance on your disks for Linux libraries, and there is still no guarantee that every application will work, but to proove the concept, Sun engineers have already successfully started BEA WebLogic Server and Oracle Database Server for Linux, Samba and Apache were also tested, as well as lots of browsers and office packages.

As Alan already said, NVidia has finally released an OpenGL driver. This driver will work only in Solaris 10 and newer Solaris releases. Everything works just fine, and just like Sean had mentioned, we’ve already tried it with Quake II!

Solaris x86 driver page on NVidia’s website can be found here.

By the way, looks like from this version on the clustering solution from Sun is called Solaris Cluster, and includes the following components:

• Sun Cluster
• Sun Cluster Geographic Edition
• Sun Cluster Agents

To my shame and regret, I haven’t got a chance to acquire any useful experience with Sun Cluster. In my company I’m working with Veritas Cluster Server, because it’s a historical thing. But I have some theoretical knowledge of Sun Cluster, and would really like to give it a try some day.

Anyway. Here are just some of the Sun Cluster 3.2 features:

New command line interface
In new Sun Cluster version, you have separate commands for each type of cluster object, and all of them try to have similar names for command line options where possible. Alsom, both short and long names for each option are supported.

SMF support
Sun Cluster is now tightly integrated with SMF, and easily supports controlling SMF-managed services as Sun Cluster resources.

Sun Cluster Quorum Server
For any scenarios requiring quorum, you no longer have to use shared storage. Sun Cluster supports using a separate Solaris server running quorum-server module. All the atomic reservations will be done over TCP/IP.

Such an approach allows you to reduce the time needed for failing over from one cluster node to another.

Extended Solaris Zones support
Sun Cluster supports now a plethora of services running within non-global zones.

ZFS support
Starting from this Sun Cluster version, ZFS is fully supported as a local highly available filesystem (HA FS).

Multi-Terabyte Disk and EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) labels
A quite traditional update for many other packages – full support of disks with capacity over 1Tb and new EFI disk labels.

Better support of Veritas products
In particular, components of Veritas Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0 for SPARC are supported, as well as VxVM 4.1 for x86/x64 (in case you didn’t know, Veritas products of these versions are already Solaris 10 aware).

Live Upgrade
Now you can use Live Upgrade to update your OS with Sun Cluster on top ot if. From documentation I can see that Live Upgrade supports SVM only at the moment, not VxVM.

Command Logging
You can have all the cluster management commands logged now – this is good for both diagnostics and for reproduction of your cluster environment in a new configuration.

You can download Sun Cluster 3.2 here: Sun Cluster 3.2 download.

Also, you might like reading a Sun Cluster blog – Sun Cluster Oasis. And, as always. for more information you can consult the Sun Cluster section of docs.sun.com: Sun Cluster 3.2 Documentation.