Solaris Live Upgrade enables system administrators to create and upgrade a boot environment that is initially inactive, without affecting the running system. A simple Solaris live upgrade procedure involves below 4 steps :
1. Creating new Boot environment.
2. Applying patches to the new boot environment or upgrading the OS version in new BE.
3. Activating the new boot environment.
4. Rebooting the system with new boot environment in effect.
Pre-requsites :
1. Disk space
– You should either have an extra disk or one disk large enough to house both the boot environments. The safest and recommended approach is to have an extra disk all together.
– In case of a ZFS root, we need not have a separate partition. ZFS uses the snapshot feature to copy only the files that are changed and thus saves the disk space.
2. Live upgrade packages
– Make sure you have the latest live upgrade packages installed.
Creating and Configuring the new boot environment
– The lucreate command is used to create the new, inactive boot environment.
– It has the single mandatory command line option -n, to name the boot environment. There are several other command line options that can be used with lucreate.
– In the following example, the lucreate command is used to create the new boot environment named new_be from the currently active boot :
# lucreate -n new_be
– When the lucreate command is invoked for the first time, the currently active boot environment is given a default name. Alternatively -c command line option can be used to assign a user-defined name for the current boot environment.
Applying patches to new environment
– The luupgrade command is used to install the software/patches on the inactive boot environment.
– The luupgrade command performs the following functions :
- Upgrade the OS image on the inactive boot environment
- Add or remove packages/patches to or from the inactive boot.
– The following example demonstrates the use of luupgrade to install patch 139503-01 on an inactive boot environment called new_be, without disrupting the existing environment. The luupgrade command validates and then installs the patch on the new BE. The -s option identifies the path to the media.
# luupgrade -t -n new_be -s /var/tmp/139503-01
Activating the new boot environment
– The luactivate command is used to activate new_be :
# luactivate new_be
– The luactivate command activates new_be, by making its root partition bootable.
– Before activating the new BE make sure :
1. new_be can not have mounted partitions.
2. The lustatus command must report new_be as complete.
– After activating and rebooting the system, you will have the new active boot environment with the installed patch.
There are several other things involved when doing a live upgrade. The post touch bases upon the concepts of live upgrade. In the upcoming posts, I will be writing on some live upgrade example. Stay tuned !