Network bootstrap process details
Now that the client-side details have been mentioned, you may be interested in the specifics of the client/server bootstrap interactions. The actual setup of this aspect of things is now primarily handled by installadm, covered a little further on.
Keep in mind that the initial bootstrap process for network installation for SPARC versus x86 is still very different for each architecture. The backend configuration is new, but still unified for both of them. However, a summary of each follows.
SPARC, wanboot, and DNS
SPARC still uses wanboot at the lowest level. The official Oracle method says that you must use DHCP boot, but whether you boot from media, or directly from network, it still basically just hooks into wanboot as its first stage.
The additional benefit from booting the first stage through DHCP is that it picks up DNS information. In theory, they could have made it pick up DNS from other means, but they have not chosen to do that at this time. This is only a problem if you attempt to use the default manifest, since it references pkg.oracle.com by name.
If you simply make your own manifest (or edit the default) to reference the package repository by IP address, AI installs will work just fine without DHCP.
PXE boot and x86
The Solaris 11 x86 net boot sequence is fairly similar to the previous one. You must configure a DHCP server to point the target machine at the tftpboot server with an appropriate PXE binary, to bootstrap everything else. If you use the Solaris bundled DHCP (which is now ISC DHCP), the installadm tool can actually do this for you with its create-client subcommand.
Installer arguments such as the install_svc_address, install_service, install_debug, and install flag itself get passed in on the GRUB kernel line, rather than in wanboot's system.conf or from the ok prompt.
One noticeable difference among the similarities is how the install and install_debug flags get passed in on SPARC versus x86.
SPARC boot cdrom – install install_debug x86 (in menu.lst) kernel /platform/.... -B install=true,install_debug=true,install_svc_address=...
For SPARC, it should be noted that primarily just the install and install_debug flags get passed from the ok prompt. Other properties get themselves set in the wanboot file of system.conf. Normally, you will no longer edit those files directly, but let installadm handle it.