News

Solaris Gets Virtualization Boost

• By David Kopf
• September 19, 2007

The new OS enables improved server utilization, as well as improved system and application performance, according to Marc Hamilton, vice president of Solaris Marketing at Sun.

With the new Solaris release, Sun improved its Containers technology, which is used to enable virtualization. Other virtualization improvements include:

• Solaris Containers for Linux Applications. With this feature, customers can run existing Linux applications on x86 systems without modification.
• IP Instances. With IP Instances, users can run multiple network stacks on a single system.
• Solaris Live Upgrade. This feature enables the deployment of new patches to systems running with Solaris Containers.

The company also added support for PostgreSQL 8.2, an open source database. The PostgreSQL support resulted in a "20 percent improvement in online transaction processing tests," according to an announcement issued by Sun. Other PostgreSQL improvements include better warm standby capabilities and online index builds, as well as support for Dynamic Trace (DTrace) probes.

Sun's new Large Send Offload feature is designed to improve network performance. The feature allows network processing operations to be offloaded to network interface card hardware, reducing the work of the CPU. The new version also includes Jumbo Frame support, as well as optimizations to provide high-speed packet forwarding.

The Solaris OS is supported on a number of SPARC, x64 and x86 processors. It runs on AMD Opteron and Intel Xenon platforms, as well as CoolThreads systems.