It is best when the root disk is at least eight Gbytes in size. Smaller disks can produce small cylinder sizes and this situation might limit the expansion potential of an image to 18.75 Gbytes.
Ensure that you use a smaller root disk than the root disk size specified by any flavor you will use to deliver the captured golden image. Namely, if you plan to deliver VM root disks that are a minimum of 16 Gbytes in size, use an 8 Gbyte to 15 Gbyte root for your golden image.
The ability to expand the root zpool depends on the disk layout. Slice expansion is attempted only for the largest slice that is followed immediately (contiguously) by free space. The contents of the slice are not considered when selecting which slice to expand.
Slice expansion might not be possible when using Linux for SPARC 1.0 if the image uses a GPT or EFI label.
You might receive a vfs_mountroot: cannot mount root error message or a similar panic on re-deployment if a LUN that has previously been used for ZFS has been overwritten with an image that you plan to capture. To avoid this issue, use empty LUNs, ZFS volumes, or files. However, if you cannot create a image in this way, ensure that the first and last ten MBytes of the disk have been cleared before installing the Oracle Solaris OS onto a LUN that you plan to capture for use as a golden image.
You can use only one disk when constructing a golden image.