ZFS Migration Issues With Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade

Review the following issues before you use Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade to migrate your UFS root file system to a ZFS root file system:

• The Oracle Solaris installation GUI's standard upgrade option is not available for migrating from a UFS to a ZFS root file system. To migrate from a UFS file system, you must use Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade.

• You must create the ZFS storage pool that will be used for booting before the Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade operation. In addition, due to current boot limitations, the ZFS root pool must be created with slices instead of whole disks. For example:

  # zpool create rpool mirror c1t0d0s0 c1t1d0s0

  Before you create the new pool, ensure that the disks to be used in the pool have an SMI (VTOC) label instead of an EFI label. If the disk is relabeled with an SMI label, ensure that the labeling process did not change the partitioning scheme. In most cases, all of the disk's capacity should be in the slices that are intended for the root pool.

• You cannot use Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade to create a UFS BE from a ZFS BE. If you migrate your UFS BE to a ZFS BE and you retain your UFS BE, you can boot from either your UFS BE or your ZFS BE.

• Do not rename your ZFS BEs with the zfs rename command because Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade feature cannot detect the name change. Subsequent commands, such as ludelete, will fail. In fact, do not rename your ZFS pools or file systems if you have existing BEs that you want to continue to use.

• When creating an alternative BE that is a clone of the primary BE, you cannot use the -f, -x, -y, -Y, and -z options to include or exclude files from the primary BE. You can still use the inclusion and exclusion option set in the following cases:

  UFS -> UFS UFS -> ZFS ZFS -> ZFS (different pool)

• Although you can use Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade to upgrade your UFS root file system to a ZFS root file system, you cannot use Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade to upgrade non-root or shared file systems.

• You cannot use the lu command to create or migrate a ZFS root file system.