Some folks may have already used Solaris Live Upgrade, to create separate instances of a root filesystem, primarily in order to safely patch systems and have targets for quick reboot or backup boot. Commands such as lucreate and luactivate will be familiar in the administration of these Boot Environments (BEs).

For those who like the lu--- toolset, the good news is that the new replacement, beadm (Boot Environment Administrator) is functionally almost identical. You create, activate, and destroy Boot Environments in a similar way to before, but now Solaris 11 administrators now have a newly named unifying tool. The tool is designed, with relevant subcommands, in the new common style of a single frontend. Instead of using lucreate xyz and luactivate xyz, one uses beadm create xyz and beadm activate xyz.

Even better news is that the ZFS + IPS integration eliminates the necessity of by-hand steps for patching, including the rather tedious tasks of hunting down spare disk...