Solaris Live Upgrade (on an SVM mirror set)

Many of you have probably heard of Sun's live upgrade feature by now. Live upgrade essentially lets you upgrade your system from one Solaris version to another with minimal downtime. If done right, the only downtime you need to suffer is the time required for rebooting your server.

Live Upgrade works like this:

• Create a "boot environment" (BE) representing your current system
• Create an "alternate boot environment" (ABE) which is a clone of your BE
• Run a Solaris upgrate against the ABE
• Switch the active "boot environment" to the ABE
• Reboot
  

Seems simple enough, right? Well, on the surface it does seem simple. There's just one problem. You need an empty partition to use as the ABE! You know what really annoyed me though? Most of the LU examples and docs I've read seem to involve using some random extra scrap of a partition for the ABE. Well, as you can probably guess, the ABE becomes your system boot partition at the end of this process. Do you really want some random scrap partition to be your system partition for the long term? I certainly didn't.

This whole procedure is also easier if you separate your system partitions from your data ones. Yes, I know this is normally a good practice. However, I've grown to just use a huge "/" and smaller "/var" on most of my machines these days. It's just easier, and I still have "/home" on an external file server.

So what was I to do? The Solaris 10 6/06 DVD set was here, and I wanted to upgrade. (my server was running the original Solaris 10 release) I needed something large to make my ABE on, but also needed it to be somewhere I was comfortable using as my long-term boot drive. I also wanted to avoid involving anything beyond that server itself. Then it occured to me... the "system disk" of my server was actually an SVM mirror set!

In short form, here was my plan of action:

• Make a backup (thankfully this machine has a DDS3 drive installed in it)
  
• Remove the second disk from the mirror and unconfigure its meta devices
  
• Run live upgrade, using that second disk as the ABE
• Switch the default BE to the one on the second disk
• Boot off the second disk, into the new version of Solaris
  
• Make sure the server is still working correctly
• Unconfigure the mirror devices in SVM
  
• Recreate the meta devices on the second disk, mirrors containing them, run metaroot, etc.
  
• Reboot again
• Add the first drive back into the mirrors

Seems simple enough, right? ;-) When all is said and done, the goal was to have the same drive configuration before. The only differences would be that my mirror components would be reversed, and I'd be running a newer version of Solaris.

While I should now show a complete walkthrough of what I did, a full post-mortem reconstruction would be rather tedious. Besides, if you're familar with SVM and can read through Sun's LU docs, following my strategy should be straightforward and simple. (yes, it does work) Just remember to install the recommended patches before using LU, or it'll fail.

Also, I strongly recommend mounting the upgraded ABE before that first reboot. You should then check the "/var/sadm/system/data/upgrade_cleanup" file for any changes of interest that it made. I failed to do this myself, and wound up having sendmail misconfigured for several hours. On the bright side, it does make backup copies of any configuration files that it changes.

Good luck!