New Oracle Solaris Zones features
In case you missed it, and how could you, the Oracle Solaris 11.3 Beta was made available today. You can find the details here.
As always the Oracle Solaris Virtualization team has been very busy and there is a great list of things that they have delivered. Here are a few highlights:
- Secure Live Migration: Kernel Zones can now be moved around the datacenter without causing an outage. End users can be unaffected and moved onto other systems whilst administrators perform key system maintenance. The secure part of the migration means that data is protected while man in the middle attacks are prevented.
- Zones on Shared Storage (NFS): Now in addition to SAN and iSCSI you can put your zoneroot on NFS shared storage. Administrators can continue to benefit from snapshots, cloning and zone boot environments while choosing the appropriate storage for their environment (right now this is for Kernel Zones only)
- Live Zone Reconfiguration: Originally introduced in Oracle Solaris 11.2, with the latest beta release the benefits of Live Zone Reconfiguration come to Kernel Zones with the ability to reconfigure the network and attached devices without the need for a reboot.
- Virtualized Clocks for Oracle Solaris Zones: We’ve just had a leap second, with virtualized clocks support in Oracle Solaris Native Zones you can now test how a system will behave in advance. Of course you could always do this with Kernel Zones but now this functionality is extended across the entire zones family.