Learning Solaris
This week at work we had some on-site training arranged to go over Solaris zones, Solaris SMF and patch management with Solaris 10. On the first day, Monday, we went over basic Solaris zones. How to create zones, how to configure zones, how to remove zones, etc. Solaris zones are a unique feature in Solaris, that allows for several isolated Solaris instances to be run within one physical server. It does not have the physical constraints of Solaris domains, it is described to be like BSD jails.
The next day, Tuesday, we went over backing up and restoring Solaris zones. Each zone has its own isolated directory structure, so to back it up is very straight forward. The next topic we went over was resource management, Each zone can have CPU shares, CPU caps and memory caps assocuated with it, to prevent one zone from taking over the entire server.
On day three we went over the solaris SMF, or Service Management Facility which has been integrated in to Solaris 10. SMF is a whole new framework that has been added to Solaris to manage the starting and restarting of daemons in Solaris, which replaces the old rc.* method of managing daemons.
The final thing we discussed was Solaris patching. With Solaris 10, they redid patching, to be more like what redhat does and whatnot, where the OS talks to a central patch server for managment. It is very cool, if it works.
Overall I found this traning to be very useful, and puts our team in to a good position to support Solaris 10 long term.