Reading this article may eliminate the migraine attached to performing this task of patching or upgrading a single system and, or the adding of a few containers. Bob Netherton's Weblog prescribes a "how to" for the task: Patch or Upgrade Solaris and how the Solaris feature, Live Upgrade simplifies the task. Netherton expresses that container patching does not need to be a troublesome task and rather can be easily solved with the Live Upgrade feature for Solaris.

On the topic of Live Upgrade, "A boot environment is the set of all file systems and devices that are unique to an instance of Solaris on a system," as defined by Netherton. "If you have several boot environments," continued Netherton, "then some data will be shared (non svr4 package installed applications, data, local home directories) and some will be exclusive to one boot environment."

He focuses on the popular areas that users have the most difficulty and breaks them down into the following areas: Analysis, Effort, Outage, and Recovery stages of this process.

Discussion Topics

Analysis: What patches need to be applied to my system?

"In summary, use an analysis tool appropriate to the task (based on familiarity, budget and complexity) to figure out what patches are needed. Then use Live Upgrade (luupgrade) to deploy the desired patches," said Netherton.

Effort: What do I have to do to perform the required maintenance?

For this section, Netherton discussed the common techniques that are used to apply patches:

• Backing up your boot environment (Automation and time tested scripting is important to prevent the human error.)

• Split Mirrors (instead of backup, which requires adequate disk space)

• Pez disks? (not advisable by Netherton because requires at least one disk that cannot be used for other purposes)

• Better living through Live Upgrade

"Live Upgrade will take care building and updating multiple boot environments," said Netherton.

Outage: How long will the system be down to perform the maintenance?

The amount of time that applications would be unavailable depends upon many factors, including the size of the patch bundle and the number of containers. For example, kernel patches would either double or triple the estimate.

"For all that Live Upgrade can do to ease system maintenance, it is in the area of outage and recovery that make it special. And when speaking about Solaris, either in training or evangelism events, this is why I urge attendees to drop whatever they are doing and adopt Live Upgrade immediately," said Netherton.

Recovery: What happens when something goes wrong?

With Live Upgrade, a new boot environment is created as, "Primary Boot Environment (PBE)", and your old boot environment "Alternate Boot Environment (ABE)" is saved and can be activated when needed.

With activation of the ABE, "Applications will be down for a short period (the K0 sync and subsequence start up), but there will be no more wringing of the hands, reaching for beverages with too much caffeine and vitamin B12, trying to remember where you kept your bottle of Tums," said Netherton. Then, you can review the logs, or with a service contract, have assistance in this area.

More Information

Dr. Live Upgrade - Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Solaris Patching

Solaris Operating System

Solaris Live Upgrade 2.0 Guide

Sun Servers

Updated: Restrictions for Using Solaris Live Upgrade

Solaris How-To Guides

Blog Offers Comprehensive Information on Patches and Patching

OpenSolaris: Your Boundless Development System [...read more...]

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Other articles in the Solaris section of Volume 134, Issue 2: A Step-by-step Guide for Installing and Configuring Logical Domains (LDoms) for the Solaris 10 OS Prescription: Solaris Feature, Live Upgrade (this article) See all archived articles in the Solaris section.

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