Actually, these are primarily Solaris 11 notes, but they will probably all apply to Solaris 10 when the next release comes out, which I understand to be scheduled for sometime later this month.
First, recently a lot of SCSI hard drives I’ve gotten have been a little mysterious about being used by the Solaris installer and have looked a little odd in format. It turns out that they’ve been EFI labeled drives. Since Solaris understands EFI labelling, it doesn’t just suggest you relabel the drive and be done with it. However, despite Solaris understanding EFI, it refuses to boot or install from EFI on SPARC hardware. The trick has been to get a prompt, then use “format -e”. Then when you choose the label command, it will ask you about a SMI or a EFI label. Choose the SMI option. If you are going to choose to do a ZFS root, then the partitioning doesn’t matter.
After fixing the disk, you are ready to install. The ZFS boot option is only offered on very new copies of Solaris (2008/05 maybe, Solaris Express build 98 or maybe slightly older definately). However, you only get the choice from the text installer. If you are installing over the serial console, then no problem, you get this by default. However, from a graphical console, you will need to use a boot parameter. Thus, you boot command will look something like this: “boot cdrom – text” or “boot net – text”. Using – nowin instead may be faster.
When you get to the ZFS option, just choose it and away you go. You can choose to name the pool something other than rpool, but there is no need to.
If you want a mirrored root, it is easy to add the second disk later. First, when you install to a ZFS root, it repartitions the root drive and uses a slice (parition) instead of the whole disk (even though the slice fills the entire disk). You will need to partition the second disk identically. Just look at the partition map if the first disk in format, then copy it over to the second disk. Then from a root prompt, type something like “zpool attach rpool c0t0d0s0 c0t1d0s0”, assuming that c0t0d0 and c0t1d0 are the two disks in question (which is a good guess on a lot of two disk Sun systems). The mirror is now made, but it may take awhile to sync up in the background, and the machine may run slowly until it is done. Check the progress with “zpool status”.
To be able to do a fallback boot to the second disk will require rebooting and going back out to the OpenBoot ok prompt. But before that, you will need to make the second disk bootable with this command: “installboot -F zfs /usr/platform/`uname -i`/lib/fs/zfs/bootblk /dev/rdsk/c0t1d0s0”
Finally, before you head to the OK prompt, you will want to find the openboot device paths for each disk. Do “ls -l /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0”. This will show you something like:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 41 Oct 1 21:02 /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 -> ../../devices/pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/sd@0,0:a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 41 Oct 1 22:57 /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0 -> ../../devices/pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/sd@1,0:a
Write down the target of the symlinks, the part after the ../../devices, changing the sd’s to disk’s, and get rid of the :a’s.
Now reboot and Stop-A to an ok prompt. If your second disks isn’t where the second disk normally will be, you will need to create a devalias for it. Assuming that you used the c0t0d0 and c0t1d0, then you can just do this:
setenv boot-device disk disk2
If you need to change the disk and disk2 aliases (or want to create new names), use the nvalias command from the ok prompt. See the man page for more detailed operation though.