You must have at the least the Solaris 10 10/08 release installed. 

Migrating from a UFS file system to a ZFS root pool with Solaris Live Upgrade or creating a new boot environment in a root pool is new in the Solaris 10 10/08 release. This release contains the software needed to use Solaris Live Upgrade with ZFS. You must have at least this release installed to use ZFS.

Disk space 

The minimum amount of available pool space for a bootable ZFS root file system depends on the amount of physical memory, the disk space available, and the number of boot environments to be created.  

For an explanation, see Disk Space Requirements for a ZFS Installation in Solaris 10 10/09 Installation Guide: Planning for Installation and Upgrade.

When you migrate from a UFS root (/) file system to a ZFS root pool, consider these requirements.

• Migration is possible only from a UFS file system to a ZFS file system.

  • File systems other than a UFS file system cannot be migrated to a ZFS root pool.

  • A UFS file system cannot be created from a ZFS root pool.

• Before migrating, a ZFS storage pool must exist.

• The ZFS storage pool must be created with slices rather than whole disks to be upgradeable and bootable.

  • The pool created with slices can be mirrored, but not a RAID-Z or non-redundant configuration of multiple disks. The SVM device information must be already available in the /dev/md/[r]dsk directory.

  • The pool must have an SMI label. An EFI-labeled disk cannot be booted.

  • x86 only: The ZFS pool must be in a slice with an fdisk partition.

• For step-by-step procedures, seeMigrating a UFS File System to a ZFS File System.

• For information about SVM, see Overview of Solaris Volume Manager Components in Solaris 10 10/09 Installation Guide: Planning for Installation and Upgrade.

• For information about fdisk partitions, see Partitioning Recommendations in Solaris 10 10/09 Installation Guide: Planning for Installation and Upgrade.

• For information about other restrictions for an EFI-labled disk, see Overview of Disk Management in System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

When you migrate shared file systems, shared file systems cannot be copied to a separate slice on the new ZFS root pool. 

For example, when performing a Solaris Live Upgrade with a UFS root (/) file system, you can use the -m option to copy the /export file system to another device. You do not have the -m option of copying the shared file system to a ZFS pool.

When you are migrating a UFS root file system that contains non-global zones, shared file systems are not migrated. 

On a system with a UFS root (/) file system and non-global zones installed, the non-global zones are migrated if the zone is in a critical file system as part of the UFS to ZFS migration. Or, the zone is cloned when you upgrade within the same ZFS pool. If a non-global zone exists in a shared UFS (/) file system, to migrate to a ZFS root pool, you must first upgrade the zone, as in previous Solaris releases.

• For an explanation of critical and shared file systems, see File System Types.

• For step-by–step instructions when non-global zones are installed, see Chapter 14, Solaris Live Upgrade For ZFS With Non-Global Zones Installed.

Do not use the ZFS rename command.

The Solaris Live Upgrade feature is unaware of the name change and subsequent commands, such as ludelete, will fail. In fact, do not rename your ZFS pools or file systems if you have existing boot environments that you want to continue to use.

Set dataset properties before the lucreate command is used.

Solaris Live Upgrade creates the datasets for the boot environment and ZFS volumes for the swap area and dump device but does not account for any existing dataset property modifications. This means that if you want a dataset property enabled in the new boot environment, you must set the property before the lucreate operation. For example:

# zfs set compression=on rpool/ROOT

See Introducing ZFS Properties in Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

When creating a ZFS boot environment within the same ZFS root pool, you cannot use the lucreate command include and exclude options to customize the content.

You cannot use the -f, -o, -y, -Y, and -z options to include or exclude files from the primary boot environment when creating a boot environment in the same ZFS root pool. However, you can use these options in the following cases:

• Creating a boot environment from a UFS file system to a UFS file system

• Creating a boot environment from a UFS file system to a ZFS root pool

• Creating a boot environment from a ZFS root pool to a different ZFS root pool

For information about using the include and exclude options, see To Create a Boot Environment and Customize the Content.

You cannot use Solaris Live Upgrade to upgrade non-root ZFS file systems. 

For more information on Planning a ZFS installation 

Chapter 6, ZFS Root File System Installation (Planning), in Solaris 10 10/09 Installation Guide: Planning for Installation and Upgrade

For ZFS information, including overview, planning, and step-by-step instructions 

Solaris ZFS Administration Guide

For using Solaris Live Upgrade on a system with UFS file systems 

Part I, Upgrading With Solaris Live Upgrade of this book