Solaris Flash Archives

Flash images or flar image is very useful in situations where you need cloning/imaging or crashed server recovery. The flarcreate command creates a flash archive. A flash archive can be created on a system that is running a UFS root file system or a ZFS root file system. A flash archive of a ZFS root pool contains the entire pool hierarchy except for the swap and dump volumes and any excluded datasets. The swap and dump volumes are created when the flash archive is installed.


NOTE: By default, the flarcreate command ignores items that are located in "swap" partitions.

Let's see how we can work with flar image creation.

Create the archive:


For UFS:

# flarcreate -n "Solaris 10 10/09 build" -S -c -x /var/tmp/ /var/tmp/S10-1009.ufs.archive.sun4u-`date +'%Y%m%d%H%M'`

For ZFS:

# flarcreate -n "Solaris 10 10/09 build" -S -c /var/tmp/S10-1009.zfs.archive.sun4u-`date +'%Y%m%d%H%M'`


Where -


The "-n Solaris 10 10/09 build" implants a name into the FLAR image. The name should be something unique and meaningful to better identify it as the FLAR image for the system.

The "-x /var/tmp/" option causes the /var/tmp/ directory and its contents to be excluded from the FLAR image since it will not be needed in the FLAR image.

-S option causes to skip the disk space check and do not write archive size data to the archive. Without -S, flarcreate builds a compressed archive in memory before writing the archive to disk, to determine the size of the archive. The result of the use of -S is a significant decrease in the time it takes to create an archive.

-c Tells flar to compress the archive as it's writing it.


E.g. -


# time flarcreate -n "Solaris 10 10/09 build" -S -c /var/tmp/S10-1009.zfs.archive.sun4u-`date '+%m-%d-%y'`


Full Flash
Checking integrity...
Integrity OK.
Running precreation scripts...
Precreation scripts done.
Creating the archive...
Archive creation complete.
Running postcreation scripts...
Postcreation scripts done.


Running pre-exit scripts...
Pre-exit scripts done.


real 19m58.57s
user 13m42.99s
sys 1m55.48s



# ls -l /var/tmp/S10-1009.zfs.archive.sun4u*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5339709933 Oct 14 04:54 /var/tmp/S10-1009.zfs.archive.sun4u-10-14-10


# flar info /var/tmp/S10-1009.zfs.archive.sun4u-10-14-10
archive_id=2f27a01690ce4fcaf398e638fcdcb66e
files_archived_method=cpio
creation_date=20101014093417
creation_master=XXXXXX
content_name=Solaris 10 10/09 build
creation_node=XXXXXXXX
creation_hardware_class=sun4u
creation_platform=SUNW,Sun-Fire-V240
creation_processor=sparc
creation_release=5.10
creation_os_name=SunOS
creation_os_version=Generic_142900-09
rootpool=rpool
bootfs=rpool/ROOT/s10s_u8wos_08a_Pre-patch
snapname=zflash.101014.04.10
files_compressed_method=compress
content_architectures=sun4c,sun4d,sun4m,sun4u,sun4s,sun4us
type=FULL


Also we can have a small shell script to create flar image -


#!/bin/sh
echo
echo Enter image name, i.e. Solaris build e.g. S10-1009.ufs.archive.sun4v
read ANS
echo "Image Name: ${ANS}" > /etc/image_catalog
echo "Image Created on: `date`" >> /etc/image_catalog
echo "Image Created by: `/usr/ucb/whoami` on `hostname`" >> /etc/image_catalog

#
# Clean up wtmpx so that new machine won't have last logins
#
cat /dev/null > /var/adm/wtmpx
#
# Now create flar, excluding -x /var/tmp/
#
flarcreate -n ${ANS} -c -a `/usr/ucb/whoami` -x /var/tmp/ /var/tmp/${ANS}_`date +'%Y%m%d%H%M'`