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...