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In this guide, we'll describe the features and benefits of SMF, point out some parts of Solaris that have changed significantly, and show how to accomplish typical administration tasks using SMF. A comprehensive guide to SMF and Predictive Self-Healing is available on Sun's BigAdmin website.
The following figure shows the primary components of the SMF framework. When you boot an image, SMF updates the service configuration repository if necessary, reads the repository data, and starts service instances that are enabled. In the following figure, libscf is the library interface that the restarters use to interact with the service configuration repository. Interaction between the service configuration repository and libscf library interfaces is managed by the svc.configd daemon. The svcs, svcprop, svcadm, and svccfg commands are the interface that administrators use to interact with the service configuration repository.
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Features
The Service Management Facility has improved several aspects of the Solaris administrative model. Some of the most notable updates are:
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