Oracle Solaris 11: First Look: A sneak peek at all the important new features and functionality of Oracle Solaris 11

Oracle databases have the reputation of being extremely flexible, extremely scalable, and extremely difficult to configure and tune, relative to other systems.

The bad news is, Solaris 11 installation methods have gone the same way, to the point where Oracle's installation docs are now an all new 200-page PDF document (Oracle document E21798, Installing Oracle Solaris 11 Systems).

The good news is, this chapter will let you know about the majority of what you need to know, in a considerably smaller amount of space.

More good news:

If all you wish to do is manually install one or two systems directly from a CD image, it is still relatively simple. Things get more complicated only when you wish to do preconfigured installs. This is because jumpstart has been completely replaced, and even wanboot has been changed.

The following topics are covered in this chapter:

Keep in mind that the normal login is root/solaris. There is also an auxiliary account, jack/jack, that is used in certain rare situations. So if the root password doesn't work at a prompt, you might want to try jack.

Installation from physical media is almost the same as prior versions of Solaris. Simply answer some questions about filesystems, hostname, networking and so on, and you're off to the races.

However, here are a few things that you should know, even with the simple installation method:

Before using the Automated Installer (AI), it's a good thing to start with a basic understanding of how the AI functions work at a high level.

At a high level, it takes a manifest and profile to determine which packages get installed, and what the identification of the system will be like. This is somewhat similar to the old jumpstart flow—which used a profile rather than a manifest—and a sysidcfg file instead of what is now called a profile.

There the resemblance mostly ends. Oracle has extensively changed the means by which the two pieces of information get to the system, and also how their contents are selected.

In the prior Solaris versions, a jumpstart client system downloaded and examined a rules file to find the best match for itself. It then read the matching profile to determine what its disk layout should be, which packages should be installed, and so on.

Oracle has now made this sort of thing a database-driven operation, albeit a simpler database than...

Now that the client-side details have been mentioned, you may be interested in the specifics of the client/server bootstrap interactions. The actual setup of this aspect of things is now primarily handled by installadm, covered a little further on.

Keep in mind that the initial bootstrap process for network installation for SPARC versus x86 is still very different for each architecture. The backend configuration is new, but still unified for both of them. However, a summary of each follows.

The installadm command is Oracle's new admin utility for system installation related issues. It consolidates and replaces things such as the old setup_install_server and add_install_client scripts.

It is surprisingly easy to install the base requirements for a local network-based install server.

// if you dont have installadm already, first do "pkg install installadm"
ARCH=i386 #or sparc
installadm create-service -n $ARCH -a $ARCH
// If you do not want it going under /export/auto_install/$ARCH,
// use -d /export/whereyouwantit

With no other options given, this will download a special package named install-image/solaris-auto-install. This is an imaged version of all of the packages in the group solaris-auto-install, suitable for a network Boot Environment. Basically, this is the set of files on the AI image. When booted off it, almost anything that applies to booting from that physical media will also apply for this net booted image.

Note that...

Either just before the install to disk happens or just after reboot, if you used the AI installer, you will be prompted for the various typical sysconfig questions, if you have not preconfigured the system. The prompts seem very similar to the old OS ones, so it is easy to get caught by one of the following issues:

The default Oracle pkg repository is http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release. This is a relatively open repository by design. Oracle allows almost everyone to use base Solaris 11 for almost any reason except for "production use".

If for some reason you end up in a state with no repository configured for your Solaris 11 machine, you can point your pkg configuration at that URL, and be able to install packages from the most recent full Solaris 11 release. However, there are no updates or patches.

Configuring your system to use it is fairly easy; you can use the following command:

pkg set-publisher -g http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release solaris

The final argument signifies a "publisher", so normally it would be something.com. Unfortunately, Oracle decided to break its own rules for this.

It is possible to have multiple publishers configured, similar to the way in which Red Hat users may configure multiple yum repositories. The rule is that there...

Solaris 11 drastically alters the way in which installation is done. There are now three different methods to choose from (LiveCD, Text Install, or Automated Install), and all of them are considerably different from the old tried-and-tested methods. Not only do you have three different bases to choose from, but you also need to have a basic grasp of the new package tools to examine the results of what you have installed.

If you are looking to just try Solaris 11 out quickly, whether through an x86 VM, or a temporary boot-from-dvd-only experience, or just the quickest and simplest way to get something on disk, then the x86 LiveCD is the best path for you to follow.

If you want something a bit more controllable, with all the knobs to tweak, then follow the text-based install ISO.

If on the other hand, you are looking to set up many Solaris 11 boxes, you should eventually travel the Automated Installer (AI) path. However, it is strongly recommended that you use Solaris 11 for a while via...