Solaris Live Upgrade (Planning)

This chapter provides guidelines and requirements for review before installing and using Solaris Live Upgrade. You also should review general information on upgrading in Checklist for Upgrading. This chapter contains the following sections:

• Solaris Live Upgrade Requirements

• Managing Packages and Patches With Solaris Live Upgrade

• Guidelines for Creating File Systems With the lucreate Command

• Guidelines for Selecting Slices for File Systems

• Customizing a New Boot Environment's Content

• Synchronizing Files Between Boot Environments

• Using Solaris Live Upgrade From a Remote System

Solaris Live Upgrade Requirements

Solaris Live Upgrade System Requirements

Solaris Live Upgrade is included in the Solaris 9 software. If you want to upgrade by using Solaris Live Upgrade, you need to install the Solaris Live Upgrade packages on your current operating environment. You can upgrade a boot environment to a release of the Solaris Operating Environment that is the same as the release of the Solaris Live Upgrade packages installed on your machine. For example, if on your current Solaris 8 operating environment, you installed Solaris 9 Live Upgrade packages, you could upgrade a boot environment to the Solaris 9 marketing or update release.

Table 34-1 lists releases that are supported by Solaris Live Upgrade.

Table 34-1 Supported Solaris Releases

Note - You cannot upgrade to the Solaris 7 operating environment.

Installing Solaris Live Upgrade

You can install the Solaris Live Upgrade packages by using following:

• The pkgadd command. The Solaris Live Upgrade packages are SUNWlur and SUNWluu, and these packages must be installed in that order.

• An installer on the Solaris DVD, the Solaris Software 2 of 2 CD, or a net installation image.

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  Note - If you are running the Solaris 2.6, Solaris 7, or Solaris 8 release, you might not be able to run the Solaris Live Upgrade installer. These releases do not contain the set of patches needed to run the Java™ 2 runtime environment. You must have the Java 2 runtime environment recommended patch cluster to run the Solaris Live Upgrade installer and install the packages. To install the Solaris Live Upgrade packages, use the pkgadd command. Or, install the Java 2 runtime environment recommended patch cluster that is available on http://sunsolve.sun.com.

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For instructions on installing the Solaris Live Upgrade software, see Installing Solaris Live Upgrade.

Solaris Live Upgrade Disk Space Requirements

Follow general disk space requirements for an upgrade. See Chapter 5, System Requirements and Guidelines (Planning).

To estimate the file system size that is needed to create a boot environment, start the creation of a new boot environment. The size is calculated. You can then abort the process.

The disk on the new boot environment must be able to serve as a boot device. Some systems restrict which disks can serve as a boot device. Refer to your system's documentation to determine if any boot restrictions apply.

The disk might need to be prepared before you create the new boot environment. Check to make sure the disk is formatted properly:

• Identify slices large enough to hold the file systems to be copied.

• Identify file systems that contain directories that you want to share between boot environments rather than copy. If you want a directory to be shared, you need to create a new boot environment with the directory put on its own slice. The directory is then a file system and can be shared with future boot environments. For more information on creating separate file systems for sharing, see Guidelines for Selecting Slices for Shareable File Systems.

Solaris Live Upgrade Requirements If Creating RAID-1 Volumes (Mirrors)

Solaris Live Upgrade uses Solaris Volume Manager technology to create a boot environment that can contain file systems that are RAID-1 volumes (mirrors). To use the mirroring capabilities of Solaris Live Upgrade, you must create at least one state database and at least three state database replicas. A state database stores information on disk about the state of your Solaris Volume Manager configuration. The state database is a collection of multiple, replicated database copies. Each copy is referred to as a state database replica. When a state database is copied, the replica protects against data loss from single points of failure. For procedures about creating a state database, see "State Database (Overview)" in Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide.

Solaris Live Upgrade does not implement the full functionality of Solaris Volume Manager. Solaris Live Upgrade supports only a RAID-1 volume (mirror) with single-slice concatenations on the root (/) file system. A mirror can be comprised of a maximum of three concatenations. For guidelines on creating mirrored file systems, see Guidelines for Selecting Slices for Mirrored File Systems.

Managing Packages and Patches With Solaris Live Upgrade

The following sections list packages required by Solaris Live Upgrade and provide information on recommended patches. See Upgrading a System With Packages and Patches for information on using Solaris Live Upgrade to add packages and patches.

Caution - When upgrading and adding and removing packages or patches, Solaris Live Upgrade requires packages or patches that comply with the SVR4 Advanced Packaging Guidelines. While Sun packages conform to these guidelines, Sun cannot guarantee the conformance of packages from third-party vendors. If a package violates these guidelines, the package can cause the package-addition software during an upgrade to fail or alter the active boot environment.

For more information on adding and removing packages with Solaris Live Upgrade, see the man page, luupgrade(1M). For more information on packaging requirements, see Appendix G, Additional SVR4 Packaging Requirements (Reference).

Required Packages

Check your current operating environment for the packages in the following table, which are required to use Solaris Live Upgrade. If packages in the column for your release are missing, use the pkgadd command to add the packages.

Table 34-2 Required Packages for Solaris Live Upgrade

To check for packages on your system, type the following command.

% pkginfo [package_name]

Upgrading a System With Packages and Patches

You can use Solaris Live Upgrade to add patches and packages to a system. By using Solaris Live Upgrade to add patches to a machine, the only downtime the system incurs is that of a reboot. You can add patches and packages to a boot environment with the luupgrade command or with a Solaris Flash archive.

• To add patches to a boot environment directly, create a new boot environment and use the luupgrade command with the -t option. To add packages to a boot environment, use the luupgrade command with the -p option. For more information, see the man page, luupgrade(1M).

• Or, you can use Solaris Live Upgrade to install a Solaris Flash archive. An archive contains a complete copy of a boot environment with new packages and patches already included. This complete boot environment or single reference system is called a master system. The process of creating a Solaris Flash archive begins with creating a master system. After you have created a master system, add any patches and packages that you want to install. Then, create a Solaris Flash archive of the master system. Use Solaris Live Upgrade to install the archive on the new boot environment. You can copy the boot environment and change and distribute the boot environment as many times as necessary. For details about how to create a Solaris Flash archive, see Chapter 21, Creating Solaris Flash Archives (Tasks). For information on using Solaris Live Upgrade to install a Solaris Flash archive, see Installing Solaris Flash Archives on a Boot Environment.

Caution - When upgrading and adding and removing packages or patches, Solaris Live Upgrade requires packages or patches that comply with the SVR4 advanced packaging guidelines. While Sun packages conform to these guidelines, Sun cannot guarantee the conformance of packages from third-party vendors. If a package violates these guidelines, the package can cause the package-addition software to fail or can alter the active boot environment.

For more information on adding and removing packages with Solaris Live Upgrade, see the man page, luupgrade(1M). For more information on packaging requirements, see Appendix G, Additional SVR4 Packaging Requirements (Reference).