Service Management Facility (SMF) in the Solaris 10 OS 
by Rob Romack
February, 2006
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 — known as Predictive Self-Healing — 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 — 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.
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