Solaris 11 networking administration has changed so much that it is almost like using a different operating system. There are clear benefits from the new admin interfaces, as well as the performance benefits of the kernel rearchitecture. The most important takeaways for the new networking paradigm are to understand what new capabilities are now available and to know which toolsets are most important to use.

First and foremost, remember the following parallel paths for tool chains:

Secondly, remember the virtualization and stackability of the new VNIC, VLAN, and aggr objects. You can treat any of these types as a first class object, where you can assign exclusive use of them to a zone, including snoop and IP address control. You can also stack...