upgrading VxVM quick and easy

(skip to Gene Trantham, section 2)

by Terrie Douglas

  1. If the root disk is encapsulated by veritas volume manager
    1. Break any root volume mirror (remove/detach mirror plex from rootvol. This way, you can simply boot back off of this mirror plex if you need to get back quickly).
    2. Save a copy of your /etc/system file
      1. Comment out any "rootdevice" lines in the /etc/system file (remember to use '*' as the comment character!)
    3. save your VxVM volumes in vfstab (by copying the current vfstab to another file, and copy the vfstab.prevm as vfstab; or comment out the Veritas volumes in the vfstab file)
    4. remove any patches you may have applied to VxVM
    5. remove (pkgrm) the current Veritas (SEVM=SUNW... or Veritas=VRTS...) packages
    6. reboot
    7. add (pkgadd) new packages from the Volume Manager cdrom
    8. copy back your original (saved above) vfstab file as /etc/vfstab (yes, you can do this before running vxinstall - it doesn't take effect until the next reboot anyway); or uncomment the volumes.
    9. Run vxinstall
      1. Do a custom install. ONLY encapsulate root disk into array - choose 4 to leave all other disks on all other controllers alone (or use an exclude file for the other disks)
      2. Let it do its reboots
    10. Done: when it reboots, you should see the volumes listed in vfstab (if you have them in a diskgroup other than rootdg. If you had them in rootdg, you're going to get warnings about rootdg numbers not being the same.)