Today I had the pleasure of testing updating one of my Solaris 11 virtual machine images to SRU1 using the ISO image for a colleague and I'm pleased to say it was incredibly easy.

Once downloaded, it was a simple matter of following the instructions in the README file for the download...

Quick Start Guide
The basic steps to use the repository copy for updating your local system is as follows. Note that "sruN" represents the number of this SRU (e.g. sru1):

1. Mount the ISO image as a filesystem:

$ mount -F hsfs {full_path_to}/sol-11-1111-sruN-incr-repo.iso /mnt

2. Add the publisher to the system:

$ pkg set-publisher -G '*' -g file:///mnt/repo solaris

3. Perform the upgrade:

$ pkg update

Of course, updating using the online method directly from the Oracle support repository (See doc 1021281.1 for how to get access) was just as easy.