After nearly a year since the last release of Solaris 10 (10/09), the latest release - Solaris 10 9/10 (aka update 9) is now available for download and it includes quite a lot of new features and of course the new Oracle branding. At this time it hasn't actually been announced, but I suspect it will be in this webcast later today.

I'm not going to list all of the new features, you can read the What's New guide for yourself, but some of the new features are worth noting:

  • Oracle Solaris Auto Registration: whilst not a feature, it's worth pointing out as it WILL affect all those that use jumpstart to install their systems. This new functionality is part of the installation process and requires the use the new auto_reg sysidcfg tag to prevent installations going interactive.
  • Physical-to-virtual (P2V) to zones: yes folks, you can now use a flash archive from a physical machine to install a NGZ.
  • Faster and smaller crash dumps: crash dumps are now saved quicker and are compressed by default so in the event your machine panics, it'll be up and running quicker and it'll be considerably easier to send your crash dump (vmdump.# - a compressed archive containing vmcore.# and unix.#) to Oracle for analysis.
  • Sendmail has been updated to 8.14.4, the client is now a separate new SMF service (svc:/network/sendmail-client:default) and the configuration can now automatically be regenerated, though this isn't the default behaviour. Watch out for this one if you insist on customising your Sendmail configuration by modifying the sendmail.cf or submit.cf files directly. You should be modifying the .mc files and this change will enforce this.
  • BIND 9.6.1
  • ZFS has seen a lot of enhancements (now equiv to snv_132) and can now autoexpand (new pool property) when an underlying LUN is expanded, RAIDZ3 has been implemented, snapshots functionality has been improved, and a new logbias property has been introduced to improve performance with Oracle databases.

As I said above, this is only a snippet of the new features. Be sure to check out the What's New guide for the full details and links to further details on the above and other features.

Go grab Solaris 10 9/10 now and take note of the new license agreement - you need to accept this in order to download.