Sun Microsystems has issued the 10 5/09 update for its Solaris operating system, offering several new components designed to improve the energy efficiency of servers.

A 'power aware dispatcher' has been added, which monitors a system's energy consumption and automatically adjusts power to the CPU.

The update also includes energy efficiency tweaks for systems running on Intel's Xeon 5500 Nehalem processors.

Sun said at the launch of the Nehalem chips last month that it would optimise Solaris and OpenSolaris for use with the new processors.

Other features in the update include the ability to manage IPsec from within the Solaris Service Manager tool, and improvements to Solaris Secure Shell components.

Virtualisation was also a focus of the update. The new Solaris can now use the ZFS system for more efficient container cloning, while the updated Logical Domains tool allows administrators to use the Virtual Table of Contents component to create very large virtualised disks.

Also in the update is improved language support, several driver updates and improved encryption components.