Chapter 10. Solaris Bare-Metal Recovery

Flash archive is a flexible, transportable, and easy-to-use utility that can perform installation, cloning, and bare-metal recovery of Solaris systems. Sun documentation presents this product primarily as a cloning and installation tool. However, since you can create an image from a running operating system and then use that image during a boot process to "install" that image to a vanilla system, it makes a perfectly good bare-metal recovery tool, and that is what I focus on in this chapter. It can be likened to the AIX mksysb command because it works very similarly.

Flash archive eliminates all the limitations of the Solaris ufsrestore utility, which required that all systems have the same hardware, kernel, and device tree set up in order to perform bare-metal recovery. Flash archive is available for Solaris 8 and above, and is fully supported across the full line of Sun servers using either 32- or 64-bit kernels.

This chapter was contributed by Aaron Gersztoff. Aaron has worked in the enterprise data protection and disaster recovery fields for over 10 years and is an avid baseball fan who has aspirations of visiting every park in the major leagues.