Moving box to S10U6 with ZFS root

So what do you do just before christmas? Well I started updating a T1000 from Solaris 10U4 to U6 with ZFS root. As this box serves a patient administration system in a hospital there is not much room for longer down times. Well except around official holidays.
The T1000 is a nice box to run databases on boot it has one problem - not a real problem more like a hurdle in terms of updating. It came with just a single hard disk when we got it. It has a StorEdge 3510 attached though.
Well sounds quite easy. Setup LiveUpgrade and off you go. In theory yes. Creation of the new boot environment worked nicely. Upgrade went fine too. The damn thing just wouldn't boot off the external disk stack. Bugger.
As there are now double disks in a single bracket available (well for some time now) I ordered a pair of disks to move the installation from one disk to the new pair.
Now the dirty part begins ;-)
As I am too lazy to replicate the installation from scratch (I could do it but it would require more time than I have at hand) I chose the adventurous route ;-)

• First of all dump the current installation to the external disk stack.
• Swap the disks.
• Boot off the net (the T1000 doesn't have a DVD drive and I didn't want to try an USB drive)
• Slice one of the new disks as desired
• Restore the dump from the external disks
• Reboot
• Be done.

Well not quite.

• Booting fails as I forgot to run installboot on the new disk, so boot net again
• Install the boot block on the new drive with installboot
• Reboot
• Done

Works nicely. Including all copying (roughly 30GB local data), net booting etc the box was running again in less than 2 hours.

What's next?
Create a new boot environment on the second disk. As we are still running S10U4 it has to be UFS again. Right now it is still populating the new BE with data from the first disk. (Yes, we are running live at this point.) Luckily the new disks (SATA vs SAS) are much faster, so this is running faster than expected.
Next thing will be the update to S10U6 followed be reboot into the new BE running S10U6. That gives us ZFS root. Once this is done and working I'll delete the first BE and create a new boot environment on a ZFS root pool. And one last reboot will bring us to where we want to be. Mirror root pool with much easier upgrade procedures next time (and just a single reboot needed).

Update
The upgrade to S10U6 took a bit over 2 hours. No problems here. Try to boot the new BE.
With the shutdown running I knew there was something missing.
Exactly.
The luactivate. Things like this happen when you drive home (90min commute) to finish this from home. Oh well!
Anyway, activated and booted the new BE.
Zpool created (remember it has to be a slice in order to be bootable! - Yes I did read the man page on that point ;-))
So now we are copying the S10U6 UFS BE to the final destination on a zpool.

Update 2
Everything made it to the new BE on the zpool. It boots. This was work for today then.

Merry Christmas everyone!