Oracle Offers Preview of Solaris 11.3 Unix OS Features

By Sean Michael Kerner

In the modern world of software-defined networking, virtual LANs (VLAN) still play a key role, enabling organizations to segment networks. With private VLAN (PVLAN) in Solaris 11.3, a logical VLAN can be segmented into an arbitrary number of sub-VLANs, providing more networking options.

Oracle is updating its folder-sharing technology that it includes in Solaris to support SMB version 2.1, which provides more scalable performance. Server message block (SMB) protocol support is integrated directly into the Oracle Solaris kernel, enabling data to be shared across Windows and Oracle Solaris systems.

Oracle’s ZFS (Zettabyte File System) has always been focused on performance, and now it gains LZ4 compression. According to Oracle, LZ4 support in Solaris 11.3 can provide a 2x compression ratio, which helps reduce CPU overhead as well as storage requirements overall.

GRUB, or GRand Unified Bootloader, is often the first thing that users will notice when a system loads. With Solaris 11.3, Oracle is now adding optional support to password-protect the GRUB menu to protect against unauthorized modification.

For developers, there is now the included capability to name application threads, which can help make it easier when debugging an application.

Secure Shell (SSH) is commonly used across Unix and Linux operating systems for remote access. The default SSH application in Solaris has always been SunSSH, but starting with Solaris 11.3, there is now also the optional choice of using the open-source OpenSSH application.

In the Solaris 11.2 release, Oracle integrated the OpenStack Havana platform, and with Solaris 11.3, the company upgraded the cloud platform to OpenStack Juno, which was released in October 2014.

Solaris 11.3 is supported on both x86 as well as Oracle’s SPARC, though some features are specific to SPARC. Among them is support for ADI, a silicon feature on the SPARC M7 that can help developers troubleshoot memory issues.