One of the new features we've introduced in Oracle Solaris 11.1 is a new utility called svcbundle. This utility allows for the easy creation of Service Management Facility (SMF) manifests and profiles, allowing you to take advantage of the benefits of automatic application restart without requiring you to have full knowledge of the XML file format that is used when integrating with the SMF.

Integrating into SMF is one of the easiest and most obvious ways to take advantage of some of the mission critical aspects of the operating system, but many customers were often finding the initial learning curve of creating an XML manifest to be too hard. With the release of Oracle Solaris 11 11/11, SMF had a more integral part to play as more and more system configuration was starting to use the SMF configuration repository for the backend storage. This provides a number of aspects, including the ability to carefully manage customized administrative configuration, site specific configuration, and vendor provided configuration at different layers, helping to preserve them during system update.

I've written a new article, Using svcbundle to Create SMF Manifests and Profiles in Oracle Solaris 11, to give you a feel for the help we can provide in converting your applications over to SMF, or doing some site wide configuration using profiles. This is the first pass at creating such a tool, so we'd love to hear feedback of your experiences using it.