In general, root pool devices are relabeled and the root pool is created when the system is installed.
In Oracle Solaris 11, an SMI (VTOC) label is applied automatically to the root pool disk or disks during installation on both SPARC and x86 based systems, as shown in the following example output:
# zpool status rpool pool: rpool state: ONLINE scan: none requested config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM rpool ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t0d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
Starting with Oracle Solaris 11.2, an EFI label is applied automatically to the root pool disk or disks during installation on SPARC based systems with GPT enabled firmware (See Firmware, Disk Labeling, and EEPROM Changes.) and most x86 based systems. Otherwise, a VTOC disk label is installed on the root pool disk, as shown in the following example:
# zpool status rpool pool: rpool state: ONLINE scan: none requested config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM rpool ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
When you attach a disk to create a mirrored root pool, use the whole disk syntax.
# zpool attach rpool c7t0d0 c7t2d0 Make sure to wait until resilver is done before rebooting.
The pool remains in a DEGRADED state until the new disk is resilvered.
# zpool status rpool pool: rpool state: DEGRADED status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered. The pool will continue to function in a degraded state. action: Wait for the resilver to complete. Run 'zpool status -v' to see device specific details. scan: resilver in progress since Thu Jan 24 08:15:13 2013 224M scanned out of 22.0G at 6.59M/s, 0h56m to go 221M resilvered, 0.99% done config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM rpool DEGRADED 0 0 0 mirror-0 DEGRADED 0 0 0 c7t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t2d0 DEGRADED 0 0 0 (resilvering)
The pool must exist either on a disk slice or on disk slices that are mirrored. If you attempt to use an unsupported pool configuration during an beadm operation, you will see a message similar to the following:
ERROR: ZFS pool name does not support boot environments
On an x86 based system, the disk must contain an Oracle Solaris fdisk partition. An Oracle Solaris fdisk partition is created automatically when the x86 based system is installed. See Using the fdisk Option in Managing Devices in Oracle Solaris 11.2 .
For more general information about managing ZFS root pools, see Chapter 4, Managing ZFS Root Pool Components, in Managing ZFS File Systems in Oracle Solaris 11.2 .