Get it whilst it's hot!
OpenSolaris 2008.11 is available right now. There has been tremendous work by the OpenSolaris Team to get this ready and usable. I use OpenSolaris everyday on my laptop. I definitely come across a few growing pains (see my blog), but there is an amazing rate of improvement. This makes Solaris look and feel like a modern development Operating System.
There are a definite bunch of changes and improvement to the core OS. COMSTAR is now shipping as part of the core OpenSolaris. There are several highlights from the storage community:
- COMSTAR and Fiber Channel target support
- ZIL + L2ARC support for ZFS (support for separate read and write caches especially to utilise FLASH/SSD)
- NPIV (virtualisation of FC ports)
- MMS (Media Management System)
- Multipathing for Tape
- Storage FMA
- NFS over RDMA
- CIFS significant performance improvement over 2008.05
We also created a few meta-packages for storage:
- NAS
- All storage packages
I strongly encourage everyone to go and check it out. The CD can be run as a live CD so you don't need to futz around with your disk to try it.
