The Solaris 10 Update 3 beta is opening up this week. Notices for the program went out last week and applications are being reviewed now. By the end of the week it is expected that people will start installing and testing it. The current release is labeled “Solaris 10 (11/06)” so we’re hoping for a November release. There was a lot of work poured into B49 of Nevada which just closed a week ago, and perhaps this is why. The current slated feature list includes (but is not limited to):

• Solaris Trusted Extensions
• APOC 1.2
• Enhanced Security for Limited Networking Profile
• Macromedia Flash Player v 7 for Solaris
• iSCSI Target Disk Support w00t!!!!
• Packet Filtering Hooks for IP Filter
• Network Layer 7 Cache
• Zone Cloning, Moving and Migration
• Configurable Zone Privileges
• ZFS file system enhancements
• Java Desktop System support for Access Control Lists in Nautilus
• Upgrade to Japanese IM Language Engine to Wnn8
• Sun Java System Message Queue Platform Edition 3.7
• Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition 8.2
• SNIA Multipath Management API support

I would normally hesitate to “leak” a list of forthcoming features like this, but thanks to OpenSolaris everything you see above are things that we already have and in many cases are running now. In the case of Joyent, my employeer, we’re running most of the things on that list in production now.

Whats most exciting is that for those of us who are running these things in production right now this will give us a chance to go back to a proper fully-supported Solaris release, at least for a while. Good good things are a comin’.