Solaris 11 zones have a few extra capabilities, some of which have been awaited for a long time now.
Zones can now be NFS servers. There's not much more to be said about that, other than "it's about time!".
zoneadm
can now doshutdown
andreboot
, in addition tohalt
.Zones can now run snoop successfully, and safely, if the zone has its own private network interface. While it was technically possible to allow snoop in a zone under Solaris 10, it was necessary to take some dubious and unsafe shortcuts to do so.
Thanks to the drastic rewriting of how the Solaris 11 kernel handles networking, this does not mean that the zone needs its own dedicated physical network interface. It is possible to allocate a virtual NIC (VNIC) device to a zone, and safely allow the zone to use snoop, without letting it see traffic from other zones that may share the same physical interface.
It is also possible to allow a zone to manage its own IP address. It is even possible for a zone to use DHCP...