We've learned that boot environments have a wide spectrum of application on Oracle Solaris 11, like patching a system, for example. This section lets us analyze the administration and management of a BE a bit more.
Without any question, listing and creating BEs is one of the more basic tasks when administering a boot environment. However, every BE administration starts from this point.
To follow this recipe, it's necessary that we have a machine (physical or virtual) running Oracle Solaris 11; we log in to the system as the root user and open a terminal. Access to the Internet is optional. Some extra space on the disk is important.
The most basic command when administering a BE is to list the existing boot environments:
root@solaris11:~# beadm list
BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
-- ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
solaris NR / 25.86G static 2013-10-05 20:44
solaris-backup-1 - - 303.0K static 2013-10-26 22:49
solaris-backup-a - - 7.26G static 2013-10-10 19:57 The next natural step is to create a new boot environment:
root@solaris11:~# beadm create solaris_test_1 root@solaris11:~# beadm list BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created -- ------ ---------- ----- ------ ------- solaris NR / 25.88G static 2013-10-05 20:44 solaris-backup-1 - - 303.0K static 2013-10-26 22:49 solaris-backup-a - - 7.26G static 2013-10-10 19:57 solaris_test_1 - - 204.0K static 2013-11-05 22:38