waddles.org Wad about me?

Suppose you have a Solaris system already set up with a ZFS root volume and you wish to clone it to another system by replicating the disks. This used to be easy with UFS volumes as you could simply use ufsdump piped to ufsrestore onto a new target disk, install boot blocks then move the new disk over to the target system and boot as normal. With ZFS there are a few extra hurdles incurred by the meta-data but it also saves us from problems like mixing up which disk was the primary mirror and which was the shadow copy. Since we can only replicate from a snapshot, we guarantee that all datasets in the pool contain a consistent set of data from a particular point in time.