Installing Oracle Solaris 10 or 11 OS Using a PXE Network Environment

The following procedure describes how to boot the Oracle Solaris 10 or 11 Operating System installation from a PXE network environment. It assumes that you are booting the installation media from one of the following sources:

• Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 installation media

• Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 ISO boot image or Automated Installer image installation media

• Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 DVD set (internal or external DVD)

• Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 ISO boot image or Solaris JumpStart image installation media

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  Note - Automated Installer and JumpStart automate many of the manual tasks of installing and configuring the Oracle Solaris Operating System for the first time on multiple servers. For more information about using a JumpStart image, see the Solaris 10 9/10 Installation Guide: Custom JumpStart and Advanced Installations. For more information about using Automated Installer, see Installing Oracle Solaris 11 Systems.

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Before You Begin

The following requirements must be met prior to starting the Oracle Solaris 10 or 11 PXE installation:

• To use PXE to boot the installation media over the network, you should have completed the following tasks:

  • PXE boot install server setup to export the installation.

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    Note - The PXE network boot does not work properly over subnets that include multiple DHCP servers. Therefore, you should set up only one DHCP server on the subnet that includes the client system that you want to install.

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  • Sun Server X2-4 MAC network port address configured as a client system on the PXE boot install server.

  For further information about setting up and installing Oracle Solaris 10 from the network, see the Solaris 10 9/10 Installation Guide: Network-Based Installations. For further information about setting up and installing Oracle Solaris 11 from the network see Installing Oracle Solaris 11 Systems: Installing Using an Install Server.

• If your install media source is an Automated Installer or a JumpStart installation image, the image must be properly prepared and ready for installation. Information concerning how to properly set up and deploy an Automated Installer or JumpStart installation is outside the scope of this guide.

  For details about creating an Oracle Solaris JumpStart image, see the Solaris 10 9/10 Installation Guide: Custom JumpStart and Advanced Installations. For details about creating a custom Oracle Solaris 11 installation image see Creating a Custom Oracle Solaris 11 Installation Image.

After completing the following procedure, you should review and perform the required post installation tasks described later in this chapter. For more details, see Post Installation Tasks.

Install Oracle Solaris 10 or 11 OS Using Network PXE Boot

1. Ensure that the PXE network environment is properly set up and the Oracle Solaris installation media is available for PXE boot.

   For details, see Before You Begin.

2. Reset the power on the server.

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   Note - The following steps use Oracle ILOM 3.1 command syntax. If you are using Oracle ILOM 3.0, refer to the Oracle ILOM 3.0 Documentation Collection at http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=ilom30.

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   For example:

   • From the Oracle ILOM web interface, select Host Management > Power Control in the navigation tree. Then, select Reset from the Select Action list box and click Save.
   • From the local server, press the Power button (approximately 1 second) on the front panel of the server to turn the server off, then press the Power button again to power on the server.
   • From the Oracle ILOM CLI on the server SP, type: reset /System

   The BIOS screen appears.

   
   

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   Note - The next events occur very quickly; therefore, focused attention is needed for the following steps. Please watch carefully for these messages as they appear on the screen for a brief time.

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3. In the BIOS screen, press F8 to specify a temporary boot device.

   The Please Select Boot Device menu appears.

4. In the Boot Device menu, select the appropriate PXE boot port, and then press Enter.

   The PXE boot port is the physical network port configured to communicate with your network install server.

   The GRUB menu appears. The sample screen that follows reflects the Oracle Solaris 11 PXE GRUB menu during an Automated Installer installation. The GRUB menu on your system will be different if you are installing Oracle Solaris 10.

   GNU GRUB version .97 (639K lower / 2078660K upper memory)
    
   Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Text Installer and command line
   Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Automated Install

5. In the GRUB menu, use the up and down arrow keys to select an automated installation.

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   Note - The default GRUB menu entry, Text Installer and command line, boots the image without starting a hands free installation. Refer to the Oracle Solaris 10 or 11 documentation for further information about this option.

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   For example:

   • For Oracle Solaris 11, select Oracle Solaris 11 Automated Install and press Enter.
   • For Oracle Solaris 10, select Solaris_10 os and press Enter.

     The system loads the Solaris disk image into memory. This process can take several minutes. When it completes, the Install Type menu appears.

     From the Install Type menu, use the up and down arrow keys to select the type of interface that you want to use to perform the installation, and press Enter.

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     Note - In the GRUB menu, if you want to redirect the install output to a serial console, press “e” to edit the GRUB menu. To support a serial console, append ,console = ttya to the boot flags on the kernel line.

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6. Follow the on-screen prompts to complete the Oracle Solaris installation and, if necessary, refer to the Oracle Solaris documentation for additional details.

   After the installation completes, the system will automatically reboot (if you previously selected this option during the configuration procedure) and will display the Oracle Solaris login prompt.

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   Note - If you did not configure the system to automatically reboot when the installation completes, you must manually reboot the system.

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7. Proceed to the section Post Installation Tasks to perform the post Solaris installation tasks.