Unified Archives are a new native archive type for Oracle Solaris. Unified Archives enable multiple system instances to be archived in a single unified file format. Unified Archives may contain one or more archived instances of Oracle Solaris from a single host. You can select individual installed zones to include during archive creation, and the host itself is optional.
You can deploy Unified Archives to recover a system that needs to be replaced due to failure, duplicate or clone a system configuration that you want installed on multiple machines, or migrate an existing system to new hardware or to a virtual system. You can deploy archives using any of the following methods:
Oracle Solaris Automated Installer (AI)
Oracle Solaris Zones utilities
Unified Archive bootable media