Written by Joerg Moellenkamp
on 

S11.4CS: General Administration - Boot Environments

Oracle Solaris 11.4 General Administration

Boot Environments

Boot Environments are individual bootable instances of the operating system that take advantage of the Oracle Solaris ZFS file system snapshot and clone capability. During a system update, new boot environments are created so that system software updates can be applied in a safe environment. Should anything go awry, administrators can boot back into an older boot environment. Boot environments have low overhead and can be quickly created, giving administrators an ideal best practice for any system maintenance work.

List available boot environment 
# beadm list
Create a boot environment: 
# beadm create solaris-05032012
Activate a boot environment 
# beadm activate solaris-05032012
Delete an inactive boot environment 
# beadm destroy solaris-05032012
Show boot environments from SPARC boot PROM 
ok boot -L
Boot into a boot environment from SPARC boot PROM 
ok boot -Z rpool/ROOT/solaris-05032012