What's New in Oracle VM Server for SPARC Software

This page includes the list of major features introduced in each of the following releases of the Oracle VM Server for SPARC (formerly Logical Domains) software:


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.72 (August 2024)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.72 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 72 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.72 software are as follows.

  • LDoms kstats added to StatsStore, and new WebUI sheets available to display them.
  • vHBA can now support both asynchronous I/O and pass-through reporting of transport status.
  • Asynchronous I/O is now enabled by default for vHBA.


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.69 (May 2024)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.69 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 69 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.69 software are as follows.

  • Fix return value being lost on ldmd startup if certificate issues are detected
  • Provide better warnings when allocating more than the base number of LDC endpoints (1984) to a guest (S11U3 SRU7 or earlier don't support the larger limit and can panic is assigned more than 1984).


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.66 (February 2024)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.66 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 66 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.66 software are as follows.

  • Correct nbread and nbwritten vsan kstats
  • Enable more debug status messages when migrating a Guest with vhba instances
  • Prevent vdc from causing a panic in low-memory situations
  • Improve handling of out of bounds CLI args
  • Clean up some issues with the XMPP API
  • Fix ldmd core dump on T4 platforms
  • Fix problem on certain Fujitsu SPARC platforms that could lead to a "bad unexpected error from hypervisor call at TL 1" panic


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.63 (November 2023)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.63 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 63 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.63 software are as follows.

  • Correct several issues with 'ldm' exit codes, output going to stderr vs. stdout, and warnings going to stdout vs. stderr
  • Fix tricky race condition in vntsd that can cause all console connections to get dropped
  • Improve efficiency of LDoms MIB
  • Clean up unnecessary messages in "ldm ls-hba" and "ldm rescan-vhba" commands
  • Improve mdb support for ldmd data types


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.60 (August 2023)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.60 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 60 OS

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.60 software are as follows.

  • Newly created logical domains are configured with the time of date (TOD) offset of the control domain to compensate for any platform real-time clock (RTC) drift
  • Add SysFW version info to ldm -V output
  • Important bug fixes:
    • Fix regression introduced in SRU54 when live migrating from older versions of LDoms when the target LDoms Manager is in FIPS 140-2 mode while fips not enabled.
    • Address vnet performance regression that communication through virtual switch (vsw) is delayed when control domain is SRU11.4.57. This fix was backported to SRU59.


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.57 (May 2023)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.57 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 57 OS

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.57 software are as follows.

  • Simplify effective pagseize support
    • Improve robustness of implementation to help locate suitable memory blocks for migrating domains
    • Eliminate need for "calculate-effective-max-pagesize" option to ldm's add-domain and set-domain subcommand
  • Resolved slow guest-guest transfers on NICs without hardware checksumming support
  • Improved internal logging of vdc & vds activity as an aid in debugging

For information about the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.57 update, see Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 Supplemental Release Notes for the resolved issues and outstanding issues.


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.54 (February 2023)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.54 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 54 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.54 software are as follows.

  • LDoms Manager now utilizes OpenSSL v3
  • Resolved performance issue with kernel zones networking when hosted in an LDoms guest domain
  • Updated several sun4v modules to leverage the Solaris Module Debugger's (MDB) new type-aware API

For information about the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 update, see Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 Supplemental Release Notes for the resolved issues and outstanding issues.


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.51 (November 2022)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.51 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 51 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.51 software are as follows:

  • Fix to allow live migrations to complete when using Oracle VM Manager with Oracle VM Server for SPARC
  • Fix to “ldm add-vsan” to properly validate that the specified path represents a SCSI HBA iport
  • Added logging for improved debuggability to virtual disk client (vdc) and domain services frameworks


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.48 (August 2022)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.48 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 48 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.48 software are as follows.

  • Important vntsd reliability and robustness improvements for guest consoles
  • Allow larger 16GB pagesizes on smaller memory footprint M8/T8 domains
  • Improve how ldmd and related utilities (e.g. MIB, ovmtutils) handle certificate validation and local connections


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.45 (May 2022)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.45 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 45 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.45 software are as follows.

  • Generic in-kernel I/O Resiliency (IOR) events
    • This is leveraged by the LDoms vHBA vsan module to provide support for I/O resiliency, so that a SCSI HBA iport encapsulated by vsan can have its PF taken down without impacting IO domains hosting associated VFs.
  • New 'mdb' annotations for LDC, vhba/vsan, vds/vdc
  • Auditing fixes for incoming migrations


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.42 (February 2022)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.42 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 42 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.42 software are as follows.

  • New 'ldmconsole' CLI option: -e (specify alternate escape character)
  • New 'ldm unbind' CLI option: -a (all domains)
    The enhanced unbind subcommand now accepts a list of domain names, as well as a '-a' option which requests all bound domains to be unbound.
  • LDoms support for new migration-class2, covering M7/T7/S7/M8/T8 platforms.
    A new migration class was defined in order to support live migration of LDoms guests between M7/S7/M8 processors with support for the DAX Coprocessor. migration-class2 is a cross-CPU migration family for SPARC T7, SPARC M7, SPARC S7, SPARC T8 and SPARC M8 series servers. These platforms support 16GB pagesizes and the DAX co-processor, which this migration class preserves. See ldm(8) for more information.


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.39 (November 2021)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.39 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 39 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.39 software are as follows.

For information about the supported hardware and minimum and fully qualified firmware, Oracle Solaris OS and hardware, see System Requirements in Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6 Installation Guide.
For information about the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 update, see Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 Supplemental Release Notes for the resolved issues and outstanding issues.


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.36 (August 2021)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.36 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 36 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.36 software are as follows.

  • Add support for auditing LDoms resource reconfiguration events.
  • vHBA's Asynchronous IO support made more robust.
  • Several important bug fixes for vHBA, Live Migration, and memory Dynamic Reconfiguration.

For information about the supported hardware and minimum and fully qualified firmware, Oracle Solaris OS and hardware, see System Requirements in Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6 Installation Guide.
For information about the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 update, see Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 Supplemental Release Notes for the resolved issues and documentation issues.


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.33 (May 2021)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.33 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 33 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.33 software are as follows.

  • Last digit of LDoms version string (the legacy build number) replaced with the SRU number.
  • Add tunable (vhba_dring_ndesc) for number of vhba.dring elements.
  • Improved VIO taskq algorithm conserves memory.
  • vHBA taskq allocation scales with number of cpus in the guest, improving cpu resource efficiency.
  • vHBA support for tagged queuing (increasing bandwidth).
  • Exposed new ldmd SMF property: ldmd/migration_mem_iterations. See ldmd(8) man page for info.
  • ldmd/fips1402_enabled SMF property removed; setting the openssl pkg mediator to 'fips-140' automatically enables FIPS 140-2 compatibility

For information about the supported hardware and minimum and fully qualified firmware, Oracle Solaris OS and hardware, see System Requirements in Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6 Installation Guide.
For information about the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 update, see Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 Supplemental Release Notes for the resolved issues and documentation issues.


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.9 (February 2021)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.9 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 30 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.9 software are as follows.

  • Auditing records are produced (under the "as" system-wide administration class) for domain lifecycle events.
  • Large performance improvement for all vsan MASK operations.
  • klog support in MDB for vdisk server (vds).
  • Created ::vds MDB command for use with klog.vds.
  • vhba now defaults to disabling performance improvement for aioread(3c) and aiowrite(3c). There is no effect on synchronous I/O and this can be controlled by the vhba:vhba_nointr kernel, tunable in the /etc/system.
  • Memory page retire operations are persisted for guests and replayed on reboot.
  • Multilevel PVLAN (i.e. in a Zone within an LDoms guest) are supported.
  • Warning-level log messages from ldmd can be turned off via "ldm set-logctl warning=[on|off]."

For information about the supported hardware and minimum and fully qualified firmware, Oracle Solaris OS and hardware, see System Requirements in Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6 Installation Guide.
For information about the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 update, see Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 Supplemental Release Notes for the resolved issues and documentation issues.


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.8 (November 2020)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.8 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 27 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.8 software are as follows.

  • Improved layout of memory blocks after a live migration operation
  • Add klog support to vsan and vdc
  • Improve numeric output of "ldm ls-netdev" and "ldm ls-netstat" commands

For information about the supported hardware and minimum and fully qualified firmware, Oracle Solaris OS and hardware, see System Requirements in Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6 Installation Guide.

For information about the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 update, see Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 Supplemental Release Notes for the resolved issues and documentation issues.


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.7 (August 2020)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.7 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 24 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2.0.7 software are as follows.

  • Add klog support to vhba
  • Add ::vhba_lun dcmd to mdb
  • Improve vhba support for asynchronous I/O for aioread(2) and aiowrite(2)

In addition, over 30 bugs were addressed since the release of LDoms 3.6.2. For information about the supported hardware and minimum and fully qualified firmware, Oracle Solaris OS and hardware, see System Requirements in Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6 Installation Guide.

For information about the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 update, see Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 Supplemental Release Notes for the resolved issues and documentation issues.


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 (December 2019)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 16 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 software are as follows.

  • The add-vsan-dev command now supports domain migration. As a result of a bug fix (27974950) delivered in the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 update release, you can now migrate a guest domain that has a vhba instance associated with a virtual SAN with mask=on.
  • New calculate-effective-max-pagesize option for add-domain and set-domain commands. Starting with the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 update release, the new calculate-effective-max-pagesize option for add-domain and set-domain appears. This option enables or disables the pagesize limit pre-determined by Oracle Solaris for a domain.
  • Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU16 OS resolves a couple issues that may impact vdisk operation.

For information about the supported hardware and minimum and fully qualified firmware, Oracle Solaris OS and hardware, see System Requirements in Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6 Installation Guide.

For information about the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 update, see Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.2 Supplemental Release Notes for the resolved issues and documentation issues.
 

Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.1 (March 2019)

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.1 update was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 7 OS.

The major changes for the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.1 software are as follows.

  • Reliability improvements in Logical Domains Manager startup, synchronization with Hypervisor and Service Processor, and several 'ldm' subcommands.
  • Improvement in Oracle VM Tools to better enable moving existing workloads onto modern hardware, OS & virtualized environments.
  • Live migration reliability improvements and improved diagnostic messages when problems occur.

For information about the supported hardware and minimum and fully qualified firmware, Oracle Solaris OS and hardware, see System Requirements in Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6 Installation Guide.

For information about the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.1 update, see Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6.1 Supplemental Release Notes for the resolved issues and documentation issues. 


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6 (August 2018)


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.5.0.3 (August 2018)

For information about the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.5.0.3 maintenance update, see Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.5.0.3 Supplemental Release Notes for the resolved issues and documentation issues.

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.5.0.3 software was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.3 SRU 35.6 OS.


Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.5.0.2 (April 2018)

For information about the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.5.0.2 maintenance update, see Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.5.0.2 Supplemental Release Notes for the resolved issues and documentation issues.

The Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.5.0.2 software was first released with the Oracle Solaris 11.3 SRU 31.6 OS.
 

Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.5.0.1 (February 2018)