Oracle Solaris 11 Derived Manifest with Automated Installation

I have been looking at Derived Manifest recently so that I can have one manifest to control the installation of Oracle Solaris 11.2 FCS on our dual boot desktops.

Ref:

• Installing Using an Install Server (Solaris 11.2)
• Setting Up an AI Server (Solaris 11.2)
• Creating a Derived Manifest Script (Solaris 11.2)

PXE booting for Oracle Solaris using Windows DHCP server

A quick blog entry about getting Solaris PXE boot working with Microsoft Windows DHCP server. I was always told it was easy but I never managed to get it to working even though a lot of people I talked to had it working.

The problem was that our network was not correctly configured for PXEbooting. Problem was our network need PortFast enable (Good Ref: Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) and PortFast).

With that enabled it was a matter of just setting the right parameters in the Scope Options of the DHCP server. (Good ref: PXE booting with WDS – DHCP Scope vs IP Helpers)

Option 060: Client identifier. Set to PXEClient 
Option 066: Boot Server Host Name: Solaris_auto_installer
Option 067: Bootfile Name: 0143162EC46C31.bios 
Option 043: Vendor Specific Info: 01 04 00 00 00 00 FF (Ref: Differential Analysis - WDS & DHCP Separation ) 

With the above set your x86 systems will be able to find the AI Server.