Planning Your Flash Archive Installation

Before you create and install a flash archive, you must make some decisions about how you want to install the Oracle Solaris OS on your systems. The first time that you install a system, you install with a full archive that is an initial installation. After a system has been installed with an archive, the system can be updated with a differential archive. The differential archive installs only the differences between two archives.

Note - Starting with the Solaris 10 10/09 release, you can set up a JumpStart profile to identify a flash archive of a ZFS root pool.

Review the following limitations before creating and installing a flash archive.

Table 2-1 Limitations When Creating and Installing a Flash Archive

Limitation	Description
When installing the Oracle Solaris OS with a flash archive, the archive and the installation media must contain identical operating system versions.	For example, if the archive is an Oracle Solaris 10 OS and you are using DVD media, then you must use Oracle Solaris 10 DVD media to install the archive. If the operating systems versions do not match, the installation on the target system fails.
A flash archive cannot be properly created when a non-global zone is installed.	The Flash Archive feature is not compatible with the Oracle Solaris Zones partitioning technology. If you create a flash archive, the resulting archive is not installed properly when the archive is deployed under these conditions: The archive is created in a non-global zone The archive is created in a global zone that has non-global zones installed
Starting with the Solaris 10 10/08 release, if you are installing a flash archive from a release before the Solaris 10 10/08 release, the archive fails to install.	If you need to install a flash archive from a previous release, boot from the previous release and install the archive.

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