There are four methods for installing Solaris software:
Interactive (Solaris Interactive Installation program) - The Solaris Interactive Installation program guides you step-by-step in installing the Solaris software. The Solaris Interactive Installation program does not enable you to install all the software (Solaris software and co-packaged software) in your product box at once; it only installs the Solaris software. After you install the Solaris software, you have to install the other co-packaged software by using the co-packaged installation programs.
Interactive (Solaris Web Start) - Solaris Web Start provides a web browser user interface that enables you to install all the software (Solaris software and co-packaged software) in your product box at once. You can install all the software with a default option, or you can use a customize option to install only the software you want.
Custom JumpStart (formerly called auto-install) - This method enables you to automatically and identically install groups of systems. It requires up-front work before the systems can be installed, but it's the most cost-effective way to automatically install Solaris software for large enterprise sites. See Chapter 8, Preparing Custom JumpStart Installations for more information.
JumpStart - This method enables you to automatically install the Solaris software on a new SPARC-based system just by inserting the Solaris CD into the system and powering on the system. The software that gets installed is specified by a default profile that is picked based on the system's model and the size of its disks; you don't have a choice of the software that gets installed.
All new SPARC-based systems have the JumpStart software (a preinstalled boot image) pre-installed on its boot disk, which is required to use this method on a system. You can install the JumpStart software on existing systems with the re-preinstall command.
When installing new systems with the custom JumpStart installation method, the preinstalled JumpStart software on the new system enables you to power the system on to start the installation instead of having to specify a boot command.
Because the Solaris software is distributed on a CD, a system has to have access to a CD-ROM drive to install it. However, if you have a large number of systems that don't have a local CD-ROM drive, or if you don't want to insert the Solaris CD into every system's CD-ROM drive, you can set up the systems to install from a remote Solaris CD image. The remote Solaris CD image must be provided by an install server, which has either the Solaris CD copied to its hard disk or the Solaris CD mounted from its CD-ROM drive.
You can use all of the installation methods when installing a system over the network. However, installing systems over the network with the custom JumpStart method is a good way to centralize and automate the installation process for a large enterprise site.
To set up your site to install Solaris software on systems over the network with no user intervention, you must:
Preconfigure network information for the systems, such as the date, time, geographic region, site subnet mask, and language. This eliminates many prompts that are otherwise necessary to identify the systems during an installation. (See Chapter 6, Preconfiguring System Configuration Information.)
Set up the custom JumpStart files for the systems. (See Chapter 8, Preparing Custom JumpStart Installations.)
Set up the systems to install over the network. (See Chapter 7, Preparing to Install Solaris Software Over the Network.)