This is turning out to be a busy week for zones related news. First,
the newest version of Solaris 10, the 8/07 release, is now
available.
This release includes the improved resource management
integration with zones that has been available for a while now in
the OpenSolaris nevada code base and which I blogged about
here. It also includes other zones enhancements such as
brandz and IP instances. Jeff Victor has a nice description
of all of these new zone features on his
blog.
If that wasn’t enough, we have started to talk about our latest
project, code named Etude. This is a new brand for zones, building on the
brandz framework, and allows you to run a Solaris 8 environment
within a zone. We have been working on this project for a good part
of the year and it is exciting to finally be able to talk more about it.
With Etude you can quickly consolidate those dusty old
Solaris 8 SPARC systems, running on obsolete hardware, onto current generation,
energy efficient,
systems.
Marc Hamilton, VP of Solaris Marketing, describes
this project at a high level on his
blog
but for more details, Dan Price, our project lead, wrote up a really
nice overview on his
blog.
If you have old systems still running Solaris 8 and would like an
easy path to Solaris 10 and to newer hardware, then this project
might be what you need.