Solaris 11 boot problems - Filesystem services

One of my our customisations on Solaris 10 is to change the root home directory from "/" " to "/export/home/root"/ The default on Solaris 11 is that root's home directory is "/root". Leave it like this, Solaris 11 doesn't cope well with that being changed.

UPDATE: It might be because that I was trying to set root's home to "/export/home/root" specifically rather than something other than "/root". Directories "/export" and "/export/home" in Solaris 11 are created automatically as part of rpool. Even if you're migrating a Solaris 10 non-global zone container to run as a Solaris 10 branded zone on Solaris 11 - this can cause problems. So after your migration, change root's home directory to "/root".

Mirroring rpool and creating a swap pool

When I order machines, I want a minimum of 4 internal disks. Two for the OS and two for swap. You can get small disks anymore so you end up with huge amounts of swap space but that's how I roll.

The steps are the same as Solaris 10.

zpool status to see your current pools and the disks in them.

First use "format" to make sure all your disks are present. Check the partition table of your current root disk and format another disk in the same manner (i.e. all the space into one slice)

partition> p
Volume:  solaris
Current partition table (original):
Total disk cylinders available: 46873 + 2 (reserved cylinders)
Part      Tag    Flag     Cylinders         Size            Blocks
  0       root    wm       1 - 46872  279.38GB    (46872/0/0) 585900000
  1 unassigned    wm       0            0         (0/0/0)             0
  2     backup    wu       0 - 46872  279.38GB    (46873/0/0) 585912500
  3 unassigned    wm       0            0         (0/0/0)             0
  4 unassigned    wm       0            0         (0/0/0)             0
  5 unassigned    wm       0            0         (0/0/0)             0
  6 unassigned    wm       0            0         (0/0/0)             0
  7 unassigned    wm       0            0         (0/0/0)             0





Setting up rpool to be mirrored:
zpool attach -f rpool <disk1s0> <disk3s0>
Wait for resilvering to finish (check zpool status) then run:
installboot -f -F zfs /usr/platform/`uname -i`/lib/fs/zfs/bootblk /dev/rdsk/<disk3s0>
 

Adding swap:
zpool create swappool mirror <disk2> <disk4>
zfs create -V 250G swappool/swap1
swap -a /dev/zvol/dsk/swappool/swap1
echo "/dev/zvol/dsk/swappool/swap1    -    -    swap   - no  -" >>/etc/vfstab

At this point you should really reboot and make sure all your changes are still there. Booting off the mirrored root disk as a test is also good practice.

T4 received and ILOM password change

I've received my new T4. Amazing how machines just get smaller and smaller. This T4 has 4 8-core cpus and 256gb of RAM. This should be faster than our current M5000s but with slightly less redundancy.

Solaris 11 is preinstalled and the RSC is an ILOM. Default root password for ILOM is still "changeme". To change the ILOM root password:

    set /SP/users/root password=<password>

When you start up the machine, it takes you into the setup interface for Solaris11. Pretty much the same as Solaris10.