On a system with multiple ZFS BEs, you can boot from any BE by using the beadm activate command. Both the installation process and the beadm activation process automatically set the bootfs property.
By default, the bootfs property identifies the bootable file system entry in the /pool-name/boot/menu.lst file. However, a menu.lst entry can contain a bootfs command that specifies an alternate file system in the pool. Thus, the menu.lst file can contain entries for multiple root file systems within the pool.
When a ZFS root file system is installed, an entry similar to the following example is added to the menu.lst file:
title release-version SPARC bootfs rpool/ROOT/solaris
When a new BE is created, the menu.lst file is updated automatically.
title release-version SPARC bootfs rpool/ROOT/solaris title solaris bootfs rpool/ROOT/solaris2
# boot -L
Detailed instructions for booting that file system are displayed.
If you have multiple ZFS BEs in a ZFS storage pool on your system's boot device, use the beadm activate command to specify a default BE.
In this example, the beadm lists following available ZFS BEs:
# beadm list BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created -- ------ ---------- ----- ------ ------- solaris NR / 3.80G static 2012-07-20 10:25 solaris-2 - - 7.68M static 2012-07-19 13:44
To select a specific BE, you would use the boot –L command. For example:
ok boot -L Boot device: /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0,2/LSILogic,sas@2/disk@0,0:a File and args: -L 1 release-version SPARC 2 solaris Select environment to boot: [ 1 - 2 ]: 1 To boot the selected entry, invoke: boot [<root-device>] -Z rpool/ROOT/solaris-2 Program terminated ok boot -Z rpool/ROOT/solaris-2
To boot automatically from the selected BE, activate that BE.