Don’t forget to apply Solaris Live Upgrade patch or …
One day you might find yourself in a similar situation as I did when I wasn’t able to create a new boot environment:
# lucreate -n SolarisFeb16 Analyzing system configuration. Comparing source boot environmentfile systems with the file system(s) you specified for the new boot environment. Determining which file systems should be in the new boot environment. Updating boot environment description database on all BEs. Updating system configuration files. The device is not a root device for any boot environment; cannot get BE ID. Creating configuration for boot environment . Source boot environment is . Creating boot environment . Cloning file systems from boot environment to create boot environment . Creating snapshot for on . Creating clone for on . Setting canmount=noauto for > in zone on . ERROR: The boot environment name does not have a boot device defined in . ERROR: Root slice device Population of boot environmentdoes not have a boot device defined in .> for BE was not found: . successful. Creation of boot environment successful.
Even the last two lines say that population and creation were successful luactivate would disagree:
# luactivate SolarisFeb16 ERROR: Unable to determine the configuration of the current boot environment.
The root case was an outdated 121430-xx patch. What is more important is that this patch is not part of the Recommended Patch Cluster:
Live Upgrade patch 121430-XX is included in the patches/ directory of the patchset, but this patch will not be applied during patchset installation. The decision to apply the Live Upgrade patch is left to the user, this is done to accommodate users who wish to independently manage the version of the Live Upgrade patch on their system. Where a user wishes to apply the Live Upgrade patch, this needs to be done manually with the patchadd command.
After installing the latest 121430-93 (as of this writing) the problem has happily disappeared.
A good reminder to myself to always check README(s).