Installation from physical media is almost the same as prior versions of Solaris. Simply answer some questions about filesystems, hostname, networking and so on, and you're off to the races.
However, here are a few things that you should know, even with the simple installation method:
There is no longer "an install image". There are now two standard flavors to choose from: Text Install or Automated Installer (AI). This will be explained in more detail in the later sections of this chapter, but the short answer is: If you're installing from physical media, you probably need the Text Install image.
No more GUI install mode. This isn't such a big deal, as GUI mode has been not much more than a slow wrapper around the text installer for a while now. However, it was occasionally nice to be able to use multiple windows and adjust font sizes, and so on.
There is an optional LiveCD (or now called Live Media, since it does not fit on a CD) image available, for x86 only. This...