upgrading VxVM quick and easy

Rather than using encapsulated rootdisk, take a look at the possibility of a deencapsulating rootdisk and skip to Gene Trantham, section 2). This methodology is tried and true and with fewer side effects and better recovery options. If you still wish to have encapsulated rootdisk, see below.

Contributed by various people:

  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. reboot to single-user mode or multi-user mode to boot of non-veritas initialized volumes.
    6. remove (pkgrm) the current Veritas (SEVM=SUNW... or Veritas=VRTS...) packages
    7. reboot
    8. add (pkgadd) new packages from the Volume Manager cdrom
    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. copy back your original (saved above) vfstab file as /etc/vfstab (or uncomment the volumes if applicable).
      3. 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.)