Listing and creating a boot environment

We've learned that boot environments have a wide spectrum of application on Oracle Solaris 11, like patching a system, for example. This section lets us analyze the administration and management of a BE a bit more.

Without any question, listing and creating BEs is one of the more basic tasks when administering a boot environment. However, every BE administration starts from this point.

Getting ready

To follow this recipe, it's necessary that we have a machine (physical or virtual) running Oracle Solaris 11; we log in to the system as the root user and open a terminal. Access to the Internet is optional. Some extra space on the disk is important.

How to do it…

The most basic command when administering a BE is to list the existing boot environments:

root@solaris11:~# beadm list
BE               Active Mountpoint Space  Policy Created          
--               ------ ---------- -----  ------ -------          
solaris          NR     /          25.86G static 2013-10-05 20:44 
solaris-backup-1 -      -          303.0K static 2013-10-26 22:49 
solaris-backup-a -      -          7.26G  static 2013-10-10 19:57 

The next natural step is to create a new boot environment:

root@solaris11:~# beadm create solaris_test_1
root@solaris11:~# beadm list
BE               Active Mountpoint Space  Policy Created          
--               ------ ---------- -----  ------ -------          
solaris          NR     /          25.88G static 2013-10-05 20:44 
solaris-backup-1 -      -          303.0K static 2013-10-26 22:49 
solaris-backup-a -      -          7.26G  static 2013-10-10 19:57 
solaris_test_1   -      -          204.0K static 2013-11-05 22:38 

An overview of the recipe

In this recipe, we had a quick review of how to create boot environments. This recipe will be used a number of times in future procedures.