A significant challenge in today's data centers is the demand for increased service levels in environments that feature increasing
complexity. The Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) introduces a new foundation that improves service levels by detecting and correcting
component failures while simplifying systems management. This foundation â known as Predictive Self-Healing â includes new technologies
that Sun has incorporated into its hardware and software products to maximize availability in the event of system faults. Overall,
Predictive Self-Healing simplifies system administration and helps to contribute to a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) in the data
center.
A key component of Predictive Self-Healing is the new Service Management Facility (SMF) in the Solaris 10 OS. SMF is designed to
simplify the management of system and application services. It delivers new and improved ways to control services, and tries to
restart failed services automatically. In addition, SMF allows administrators to define the relationships between services. It is
now possible to define a service that is dependent on other services â a dependent service will not run unless the other services
that it requires are already running. Through a set of new administrative interfaces, SMF allows services to be easily and
consistently configured, enabled, and controlled, at the same time providing better visibility of errors and improved debugging
capabilities to resolve service-related problems quickly when they occur.
This BluePrints article is intended for system administrators. It introduces the functionality provided by the Service Management
Facility and demonstrates the use of new SMF administrative commands. It assumes that the reader has a reasonable level of
knowledge of the Solaris OS (in particular, of OS versions prior to Solaris 10), or of other UNIX systems in general. The article
makes the assumption that the reader is not already familiar with SMF or other specifics of the Solaris 10 OS.
Note: This article is available in PDF Format only.
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