Sun released the third maintenance update for Solaris 10 yesterday. The What’s New documentation covers all the features it adds to Solaris 10. There’s so much Good Stuff in this update that’s it really should be called “Solaris 10.5”. The ones most exciting and immediately useful to me:
- Storage Networking Industry Association Multipath Management API SupportBasically, this adds the ability to manage Solaris’s fibre channel multipathing without having to manually edit /kernel/drv/scsi_vhci.conf and rebooting. It’ll also present you with clear status on multipath’d links without having to piece together lines from syslog. See the new mpathadm(1m) command.
- Logical Domains (LDoms) 1.0 SoftwareLogical hardware partitions for sun4v-based servers! This means you can now take advantage of the hardware hypervisor on your Sun Fire T1000 or T2000 to carve it up into up 32 independent logical domains, each running their own OS instance.
- Recursive ZFS snapshots, Double Parity RAID-Z (raidz2), Hot-spares for ZFS storage pool devicesRecursive ZFS snapshots is a godsend to those (like me) who have many nested ZFS file systems. One command will now snapshot them all, rather than having to explicitely snapshot each one individually. DP RAID-Z (raidz2) is another feature comperable to what’s known as “RAID 6”, and of course hot spare device support, the usefulness of which is self-evident.