Deal-breakers for real use of Solaris 11 Express

Question

I run Solaris 10 U9 for my home 12TB NAS box - based on Supermicro H8SSL-i2 motherboard (ServerWorks HT1000 Chipset and Dual-port Broadcom BCM5704C) and their 8-port SATA2 PCI-X card (AOC-SAT2-MV8). It's a great (but aging) platform and a rock solid OS with the unbeatable ZFS volume manager/filesystem.
However, despite my willingness to run Solaris 11 Express in this role, I can't because of these deal-breakers:
1) Lack of a full-featured installer that allows me to lay out or preserve existing partitions the way I want. Making /var a separate file system is a must. Ideally, I'd be able to run multiple versions of Solaris on the same box by customizing grub, and use my ZPOOLs on either Solaris 10 or 11 Express while I learn the new OS.
2) Lack of support for the Broadcom BCM5704C dual-port gigabit NIC (and others), which work wonderfully under Solaris 10, but are badly broken under Solaris 11 Express. I know I could disable the on-board Broadcom NICs and go buy an Intel card - but why the need for this? Won't there be a fix for Broadcom NICs?
3) Lack of support for modern, generic, server-class motherboards and PCI-e multi-port SATA/SAS cards. I wonder about the future for Solaris without support for modern, affordable x64 server hardware.
Maybe I'm missing the point and Solaris 11 Express is only intended to be run as a virtual machine under VBox or VMware. But it would sure be nice to be able to run it on my real hardware - even if it is just a small hobbyist rig. Any suggestions?
Regards,
Mike

Answer 1

In Solaris 11, you get a separate /var by default. If you update from Solaris 11 Express to Solaris 11, this transition doesn't happen automatically. If you decide to tackle it on your own, you need to be sure that it is done in a way that beadm, pkg, and other consumers of libbe will handle properly. I would recommend something along the lines of the following. This is untested and may break your system - prove it out somewhere unimportant first.
Do the work in a new boot environment so you reduce the likelihood that you will break things in an unrecoverable way.
# beadm create sepvar
# beadm mount sepvar /mntFigure out the name of the root dataset of the new boot environment, then create a var dataset as a child of that.
# rootds=$(zfs list -H -o name /mnt)
# zfs create -o mountpoint=/var -o canmount=noauto $rootds/varMount this new /var and migrate data
# mkdir /tmp/newvar
# zfs mount -o mountpoint=/tmp/newvar $rootds/var
# cd /mnt/var
# mv $(ls -A) /tmp/newvarUnmount, remount
# umount /tmp/newvar
# beadm unmount sepvar
# beadm mount sepvar /mntAt this point /mnt/var should be a separate dataset than /mnt. The contents of /mnt/var should look just like the contents of /var, aside from transient data that has changed while you were doing this. Assuming that is the case, you should be ready to activate and boot the new boot environment.
# beadm activate sepvar
# beadm unmount sepvar
# init 6