Solaris 11.1 Released!

Abstract:
Solaris is a long-lived operating system, dating back to the BSD days of Sun Microsystems, absorbing SVR4 UNIX from AT&T during the dot-com economic expansion, moving Open Source under the waning days of Sun Microsystems, becoming the first Cloud OS after Oracle's acquisition. During this past year, new additions have occurred to the flagship OS, most recently called Solaris 11.1.

Announcement:
Solaris 11.1 was announced during the October OpenWorld 2012. A variety of features were listed in the Solaris 11.1 "whatsnew" PDF which was made available.

• Installation

1. Support for a new set of role-based authentication control (RBAC) profiles and authorizations for managing the Automated Instal (AI) service, including the profile Install Service Management.
2. Automated Installer (AI) command line (installadm) supports 3 new options, update-service, update-profile, and set-service.
3. Ability to specify manifest location with system boot argument.
4. Install to iSCSI target LUNs added to interactive installers (AI).
5. Automated Installers (AI) support automatically connect to Oracle support services using Oracle Configuration Manager and Oracle Auto Service Request.

•  Packaging

1. A 4x speedup on systems with 20 zones for parallel zone update.

• System Configuration

1. New options extract and delcust for svccfg(1M) to help diff and apply customizations to other systems. 
2. Improvements to svccfg editprop to ease making changes via text editor. 
3. svcbundle(1M) command eases SMF manifest and profile creation (NO XML! WOO HOO!)
4. New pfedit utility allows Administrators to delegate ability to auditably edit administrative files  without privileged mode.
5. New rsyslog daemon can be enabled by disabling svc:/system/system-log:default and enabling svc:/system/system-log:rsyslog services.

• Virtualization

1. Zones asier to create and manage.
2. Increased resource management & monitoring of Zones. 
3. P2V migration of Solaris 10 Environment. 
4. Path of Fiber Channel or iSCSI device added to zonecfg(1M) encapsulates zone into own zpool for better encapsulation and portability.
5. Zone install time decreased 27 percent. 
6. Zone attach time decreased 91 percent. 
7. Per-fstype kernel statistic (kstat) for each Zone. 
8. Global Zone exclusive kstat activity reporting.
9. Extend secure remote administration via Remote Administration Daemon (RAD) to Zones.
10. The lofi devices, used by zones to access & share now experiences read and write performance gains of 90% and 6x, respectively.

performance has been increased by up to 90 percent, while write performance is up to 6x


Launch:
Hope you see/saw the Solaris 11.1 Launch Event on November 7, 2012!