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Update to Oracle Solaris 10 Focuses on ZFS File System

• By Leila Meyer
• 09/27/11

Oracle has released Solaris 10 8/11, an update to the Solaris 10 operating system, designed to improve Oracle Solaris ZFS and Live Upgrade technologies, support the latest SPARC and x86 systems, and improve the performance of Oracle Database 11g.

Many of the new features included in this update focus on support for the Oracle Solaris file system, ZFS, with the goal of easing the transition from UFS-based system disks to Oracle Solaris ZFS, which Oracle touts as providing better management, data integrity, and built-in data services. Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade has also been improved to support system maintenance on ZFS-based file systems.

Features new to this version of Solaris include:

• Support for installation from a ZFS flash archive (flars);
• Support for system upgrades from a ZFS root flash archive using Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade;
• Support for migration from a UFS or ZFS boot environment to a ZFS boot environment with a separate /var file system, also through Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade;
• ZFS "diff" command to list the differences between two ZFS snapshots;
• Ability to import a pool with a missing log or import a pool in read-only mode, which enables greater flexibility in recovering from errors;
• Option to bypass the power-on self test (POST) to speed up reboot on SPARC systems;
• Support for diskset import through the metaimport command when running an Oracle Solaris Cluster configuration;
• Faster startup and shutdown of Oracle Database when using Oracle Solaris Intimate Shared Memory (ISM); and
• ZFS performance improvements, including improved sequential read/write I/O improvements.

Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 is available now. Further information can be found at oracle.com.