A system catalog is a software inventory of installed instances and versions of Oracle Solaris 8 - 10 OS updates, Linux RPMs, and local software.
Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center automatically takes a snapshot of the operating system after executing any job on the OS, including when you discover and manage the operating system, start the Agent Controller, and when you update the operating system. A snapshot is stored on the Enterprise Controller as a catalog with the time stamp and job details after every update job that you run on a system.
Note:
Oracle Solaris 11 operating systems do not have or use snapshots. or system catalogs. Instead, the Oracle Solaris 11 operating system manages the OS packages.
You can create a new catalog at any time and use it to record the state of a system. Catalogs enable you to rollback your system to any previous configuration or to create a profile that you can use to apply a consistent configuration throughout your data center.
The Catalog List contains all of the snapshots. When you create a historical catalog, the current state of the selected system is identified and stored as the previous catalog of the system. The saved previous catalog is the most recent system catalog.
Note:
You can create a historical catalog only for the current state of the system.
The catalog list always provides the listing of the most recent catalog. The software updates the catalog list whenever you update a system or create an historical catalog. You can identify the current catalog by the time stamp. You can use an historical catalog to create a profile and apply it to configure other systems.
When you are using dual boot environments for Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade (Oracle Solaris 10), the catalog displays the inventory of the active boot environment of the operating system.
To view the catalog of an alternate boot environment (ABE), you must first activate the ABE from the UI, and then wait for the job to finish. The software updates the current catalog and contains the ABE catalog information and OS software components. This automatically updates the catalog of any zones.
When you have an alternate boot environment, you cannot create and compare catalogs until you activate the ABE. By default, only the catalogs of the active boot environment are compared.
You can compare two managed systems or two system catalogs for differences in the installed update components. You can also compare the current system catalog and saved snapshots of the same managed system to examine the differences in the components that are installed and uninstalled after executing a job.
Use the Compare Catalogs option to change the software components of a particular operating system to that of the source system.
The following options are available when you compare catalogs:
Differences Between Systems: Displays the difference between the source and the target systems update components. The difference appears in the Compare Catalog window.
Tasks to Make Target Like Source: Creates the list of components that must be installed on the target system. Select Include for the components to install on the target system.