Having a bootable DVD for system recovery and bare-metal rebuilds is essential to many system administrators. Ross Moffatt has shared his approach for a full install onto a 16G virtual disk using a zfs root file system.

Posted on the BigAdmin System Management Tools wiki, Moffatt's work begins with a system that runs the Solaris 10 OS for x86 platforms within a Sun VirtualBox.

The requirements in creating this custom boot DVD-ROM are:

• The Solaris 10 OS software media.
• A server running the Solaris 10 OS for x86 platforms.
• A file system with approximately 1Gbyte plus double the size of additional files desired for the disk, to which temporary and image files can be written.
• A CD/DVD burner with appropriate software, which needs up to 8Gbytes of space (if a dual-layer DVD is used) for the DVD ISO file.
• A blank DVD-ROM or CD-ROM.

Moffatt alerts readers to the fact that a DVD can only hold about 4GBytes (or 8GBytes if dual layer) of data. He also informs users that a CD only hold 600 odd MBytes and the space taken to be bootable is about 200MBytes.

The procedures described in this piece cover:

• stopping Solaris Volume Manager if it is active,
• manually mounting the Solaris 10 install DVD,
• setting up a temporary build directory,
• starting Solaris Volume Manager,
• adding files,
• creating the ISO Image, and
• booting With the DVD/CD.

The value in possessing a bootable DVD range from enabling users to restore to a known point or make a duplicate installation of a system, to having a bare-metal recovery CD/DVD that makes the host bootable so another backup method can be used, or for use in extremely hostile/secure environments where file transfers to and from the host are disabled.

More Information

Creating a Solaris 10 x86 OS Bootable DVD or CD

BigAdmin Resource Collection: Solaris on x86 platforms

Solaris Product Page [...read more...]

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