Oracle Solaris 10 Extended Support now till Jan 2025

Oracle has once again changed the Extended Support for Solaris 10
from January 2024 now to January 2025.

You can find all the Support dates in

http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support-hardware-301321.pdf

New Features in Solaris 11.4 SRU54 (February 2023)

Another quarterly Solaris SRU including new features

16 byte EUI-64 LUN GUID identifier for Kernel Zones
snapdestroy ZFS permission
--scale option in dlstat/flowstat/ipstat/tcpstat/quota

FOSS: Python 3.11, GCC 12.2.0

I/O experiences with Solaris X86 on OCI

Ultra High Performance(UHP) block volumes can't be attached to Solaris
at the moment using ISCSI. This type of volume can only be attached
paravirtualized to a VM.
The volume should be able to handle 1200MB/s.
The maximum I could reach on a large VM was 750MB/s.

Best solution seems to use Balanced with Auto-tune.
I/O limits are based on the volume size, for example
for a 50GB volume the limit is at 30MB/s

Highest for a 1TB volume is around 600MB/s on bare metal.
On a large VM I could reach the same 600MB/s. Looks like
the virtualization layer has no impact on the performance.

On smaller VMs the performance is limited
by the network speed and the number of CPUs.
With 2 cores the maximum I reached was around 250MB/s

Solaris X86 on OCI BareMetal or Virtual Machine?

For Solaris workloads Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
offers multiple options: Bare Metal and Virtual Machine
on AMD or Intel CPUs.

With Virtual Machines you are flexible with Memory and CPU
Configurations. From 1 OCPU (core) up to 64 and up to 1 TB RAM.
Depending on your load you can change the size of the VM, but
you need to reboot to activate the VM with the new settings.

Bare Metal have fix sizes from 512 GB RAM up to 2 TB and
between 36 OCPU up to 160 OCPU. The available shapes
may be limited on your cloud region.
Bare Metal have currently the limitation you can't attach
UHP (Ultra High Performance) block volumes.

For both types Bare Metal and VM you are not charged if you shutdown
your instance.

My current favorite is the VM type because of the flexibility to resize.
So far I did not encounter high performance impact by the Virtualization layer.

Solaris 11.4 x86 in Oracle Cloud OCI VM

Oracle currently offers the Oracle Cloud in 40 regions.
One of the many options available is a Solaris 11.4 x86 Virtual Machine.
You can create a VM with up to 1TB RAM and 64 OCPUs (cores).

The creation is very easy and the setup is done in a few minutes.

How to create a VM can be found on the Oracle Solaris Blog


The OS management is currently not available to monitor the Solaris instances.
The commercial JomaSoft VDCF tool is an option to be used for monitoring.

I/O performance depends on the configuration of the block volumes and on
the CPU resources used by the Virtual Machine.
But even with 16 cores I never reached more than 100MB/s

Solaris 11.4 SRU51 (Nov 2022) - virtinfo enhancements for Solaris Zones

In the past virtinfo provided only minimal information about the underlying global zone.

root@marcel49:~# uname -a
SunOS marcel49 5.11 11.4.47.119.2 sun4v sparc sun4v non-global-zone

root@marcel49:~# virtinfo get all
NAME            CLASS       PROPERTY VALUE
non-global-zone current     -        -
logical-domain  parent      -        -
non-global-zone unsupported status   not supported in non-global-zone
kernel-zone     unsupported status   not supported in non-global-zone
logical-domain  unsupported status   not supported in non-global-zone


After upgrade to SRU51, we have details from the parent.

Remark: I modified our serial number in the output below.
The serial is helpful if you need to open a case with Oracle Support.

root@marcel49:~# uname -a
SunOS marcel49 5.11 11.4.51.132.1 sun4v sparc sun4v non-global-zone

root@marcel49:~# virtinfo get all
NAME            CLASS       PROPERTY              VALUE
non-global-zone current     zonename              marcel49
non-global-zone current     chassis-serial-number AK99999999
non-global-zone current     parent-hostname       g0049.jomasoft-lab.ch
logical-domain  parent      -                     -
non-global-zone unsupported status                not supported in non-global-zone
kernel-zone     unsupported status                not supported in non-global-zone
logical-domain  unsupported status                not supported in non-global-zone

Output of values is also supported

root@marcel49:~# virtinfo -c current get -H -o value parent-hostname
g0049.jomasoft-lab.ch

New Features in Solaris 11.4 SRU51 (November 2022)

Another quarterly Solaris SRU including new features

Live Memory Reconfiguration for Kernel Zones on x86
Setting disk IDs for Kernel Zone live storage migration
Propagating hosting environment information in to zones
zpool/zfs -o atime/pathname
/dev/full device
mkfile size argument update
FOSS: GCC 12, perl 5.36, Unbound DNS server
EOF: hal-cups-utils

Stay tuned for more blogs about this new features