Oracle introduced Solaris 11.2 Beta

Hello!

I did not find this news on Habré, although the event happened back in April.

After a year and a half of development, Oracle introduced the release of the Solaris 11.2 operating system. A Solaris 11.2 beta is currently being prepared for download, with installation images available for x86 and SPARC architectures. For the x86 architecture, an optional Live demo system is supplied. Among the key improvements in the new release, integration of tools to support the work of cloud infrastructures based on the OpenStack platform, support for isolated types of kernel zones containers, and new capabilities for deploying SDN networks are noted.

Main innovations of Solaris 11.2:

- Inclusion in the delivery of a full stack for the creation and maintenance of cloud infrastructures, as well as the management of associated computing resources, storage and network capabilities. The stack is based on the OpenStack platform and provides common tools for managing cloud systems, both based on Solaris VM and Solaris Zones, and based on Xen and KVM hypervisors;
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- Unified archives - a new form of backup and archiving, allowing you to clone the current working environment for subsequent recovery in case of failure or for quick deployment of a copy in the cloud infrastructure;

- Support for dynamic reconfiguration and renaming of isolated environments based on Solaris Zones without rebooting;

- A new type of container Kernel Zones, allowing the use of different versions of the Solaris kernel in different isolated environments. The new feature also allows you to update the kernel of some isolated environments without restarting the host system (global Zone);

- A new system for the deployment of software SDN-networks (Software Defined Network), allowing to implement equipment-independent methods of processing and prioritizing network traffic, taking into account the needs of applications. Integration of the Elastic Virtual Switch component for creating virtual networks;

- The tools for updating the firmware and managing the firmware are integrated into the package management tools, which makes it possible to ensure that there are always correct firmware when updating the system;

- ZFS optimized performance, provided a process to display the progress of performing long operations, improved means for storing data in compressed form, working on hybrid storages and data encryption;

- Added the compliance utility to check for current updates, assess current security settings and identify possible signs of security breaches;

- Improved tools for automated installation of a large number of servers, organization of servers for distributing updates and creating mirrors of package repositories;

- Added a new group of packages solaris-minimal-server to set the minimum server environment;

- A new exact-install command has been added to the pkg package manager to return the system to its original state without removing individual packages;

- For the SPARC platform, the formation of bootable USB-carriers began;

- Added support for VXLAN (Virtual Extensible Local Area Network), L3 VRRP (Layer 3 Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol), PTP (Precision Time Protocol), DLMP (Probe Based Failure Detection in Datalink Multipathing);

- Added support for IKEv2 (Internet Key Exchange 2);

- Includes two new monitoring utilities, ipstat and tcpstat;

- Increased the scalability of DTrace;

- Added processor_affinity system call for linking processes or threads to specified CPU cores;

- Java 8, GCC 4.8 and MySQL 5.5 are included in the delivery.