Oracle Solaris 11.4 Open Beta Released!

Today we released Oracle Solaris 11.4 public beta (#solaris114beta).

This latest update in our continuous innovation stream delivers many new features and enhancements to help secure your data, simplify the system and application lifecycle, and streamline your cloud journey, while preserving your current on-premises investment.

Oracle Solaris is engineered for security at every level, allowing you to spend time innovating while reducing risk. New security features include:

• New application sandbox management tool for constraining both privileged and unprivileged apps, even within a single virtualization environment
• Automatically protect key applications and the system kernel with enhanced exploit management controls that leverage Oracle SPARC Silicon Secured Memory
• Stay secure and compliant with an integrated deployment workflow, now with the ability to gather compliance assessments for multiple instances
• Trust what is running with secure WANboot and secure UEFI boot on x86
• Easily build and control immutable environments with even better change control and trusted services.

The new sandboxing capability allows you to control exactly what an application can see, and even what different aspects of an application can see.  So, for example, you can prevent the DB admin in two different databases from seeing the data files of the other database, even in a container database environment.

We've enhanced compliance to be able to report all your Oracle Solaris 11.4 systems and to also report on configuration changes on the systems in a single step.

SPARC Silicon Secured Memory is now easier to use on applications and can be controlled on a system-wide or file basis easily with our sxadm(1) tool, and is enabled in the kernel by default.

We've continued to simply the system and application life-cycle. Making common tasks easier and taking less time, enabling you to adapt to business needs quickly and run your data center with the utmost confidence and efficiency. 

• Improved zone migration between systems using shared storage, including support for NFS shared storage, and the ability to predefine destination systems for each zone
• New live zone reconfiguration allows datasets to be added without reboot, reducing downtime
• Easy monitoring, restart and notification of zone states with zone dependency that allow zones to describe the required boot order
• Improved ZFS replication using send streams for backup and archive, with the introduction of RAW streams and improved stream deduplication
• Improved administrative and automation experience when deleting large datasets with ZFS asynchronous dataset destroy
• New planned graceless recovery support reduces downtime for NFS clients on server reboots
• New StatsStore delivers powerful data and deep insights into what is happening on your systems
• Updated compliance reporting gives deep insight into system compliance
• New SMF Goal Services capability delivers single point of monitoring for business functionality.

The new StatsStore also has a technology preview web GUI that will show you the statistical data in nice graphs. RAW sends stream for ZFS means that you can now forward compressed and encrypted data between datacenter as efficiently as possible.

No matter what the enterprise workload from ERP to DevOps, Oracle Solaris delivers secure, reliable and agile compute that will setup your business for the new wave of enterprise computing.

• Enhanced secure remote administration greatly reduces risks and errors
• New dehydrated unified archives provide ability to remove the OS portion of the archive, reducing archive size and making it easier to move into cloud environments
• Encrypt everything, everywhere, all the time – now with the ability to retrieve crypto keys from OASIS KMIP (Key Management Interoperability Protocol) key servers such as the Oracle Key Vault or third-party KIMP compliant servers
• Updated FOSS evaluation packages, including golang.

That is only a brief look at what's available in Oracle Solaris 11.4 beta. There is a wealth of information already available on Oracle Solaris 11.4. For more information, you can read the data sheet. The What's New is invaluable for finding out the details. For your frequently asked questions, we have the FAQ. Please do read the Release Notes for important information about this release.

There are also many blogs coming to this very site as well as others such as those Brian (Oracle ACE Director, Collier IT) and Erik (Oracle ACE Director, Mythics) already posted.

Go download it now and try it yourself!