Oracle Solaris 11.3: SMB 2.1 will it make a difference

As you will be aware Oracle Solaris 11.3 supports SMB 2.1 which brings improvements over SMB/Samba 3.6 version on Solaris 11.2:

• Reduces the previous number of SMB 1.0 commands and sub commands from over a hundred to just 19 commands.
  
• Supports a new caching model called Lease. This model enables the client to have multiple opens on a single file which helps in holding on to the cache.
  
• Provides more scalable performance for high-speed networks and includes the following performance benefits:
  
  • SMB payload requests can scale up to 1MB instead of 64K.
    
  • Reduces CPU utilization on the server and client.
    
  • SMB clients gain the performance benefit of not losing local caching when the same file is opened multiple times.
    

Comparing SMB versions(dialect):
SMB 3.02: Windows 2012 R2
SMB 3.00: Windows 2012    , Samba 4.1
SMB 2.10: Windows 2008 R2 , Solaris 11.3
SMB 2.00: Windows 2008    , Samba 3.6 (dialect=1.5)
SMB 1.00:                 , Solaris 11.2 (dialect=1.5)

I decided to run some test on Windows 7 clients using IOzone Filesystem Benchmark to measure file performance (What you're really testing is your system's buffer cache + disk cache + disk speed combo) using a collection of different servers.

Oracle Solaris 11 Derived Manifest and modifying the boot system

This is a follow on from last last blog entry "Oracle Solaris 11 Derived Manifest with Automated Installation", where I mentioned that I could not examine the disk partitions of the new system since the aiuser does not have permission to run fdisk.

Quote: "The derived manifest script can run commands to read system attributes. AI runs the script as role aiuser. The aiuser role has all the privileges of a non-privileged user plus the following additional privileges: solaris.network.autoconf.read, solaris.smf.read.* 

The aiuser role is non-privileged except that it can read more information from the system than other non-privileged users. The aiuser role cannot change the system."