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Creating and Administering Oracle Solaris 11.1 Boot Environments     Oracle Solaris 11.1 Information Library
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Document Information

Preface

1.  Introduction to Managing Boot Environments

2.  beadm Zones Support

3.  Creating Boot Environments and Snapshots

Creating a Boot Environment

beadm create Command Options

How to Create a Boot Environment

Examples of Creating Boot Environments

Creating and Copying Snapshots

Creating a Snapshot of a Boot Environment

Creating a Boot Environment From an Existing Snapshot

How to Create a Boot Environment From a Snapshot

4.  Administering Boot Environments

Index

Creating and Copying Snapshots

You can manually create a snapshot of an existing boot environment for reference. This snapshot is a read-only image of a dataset or boot environment at a given point in time. You can create a custom name for the snapshot that indicates when the snapshot was created or what it contains. You can then copy that snapshot.

Creating a Snapshot of a Boot Environment

The following command creates a snapshot of the existing boot environment named BeName.

beadm create BeName@snapshotdescription

The snapshot name must use the format BeName@snapshotdescription. BeName is the name of an existing boot environment that you want to make a snapshot from. If the existing boot environment name is not valid, the command fails. snapshotdescription is a custom description to identify the date or purpose of the snapshot.


Note - If you do not use the snapshot name format, the beadm create command will try to make a bootable clone instead of a unbootable snapshot. A clone is a complete bootable copy of an image that can be much larger than a mere snapshot. The snapshot merely records what's changed in the datasets instead of copying all the datasets contents.


Note the following snapshot sample names and descriptions:

Some other system functions automatically take snapshots of a boot environment. Names for such snapshots automatically include a timestamp that indicates when the snapshot was taken. You must use the beadm create command if you want to customize a snapshot name.

Creating a Boot Environment From an Existing Snapshot

A snapshot of a boot environment is not bootable. However, you can create a new boot environment from an existing snapshot. Then you can activate and boot that new boot environment.

How to Create a Boot Environment From a Snapshot

  1. Become an administrator.

    For more information, see How to Use Your Assigned Administrative Rights in Oracle Solaris 11.1 Administration: Security Services.

  2. Create a new boot environment from a snapshot.
    # beadm create -e BEname@snapshotdescription NewName

    BEname@snapshotdescription is the name of an existing snapshot and description. NewName is a custom name for your new boot environment.

    For example:

    # beadm create -e BE1@now BE2

    This command creates a new boot environment named BE2 from the existing snapshot named BE1@now.

Next Steps

You can activate this new boot environment. See Changing the Default Boot Environment.