Upgrading Solaris (Solaris 9 09/04 -> 9 09/05) without de-encapsulating rootdisk.

From: void05@cojot.name
Date: Tue Nov 07 2006 - 15:22:06 EST


Hello everyone,

Like many of you with high-end platforms, I'm planning to upgrade several
SF15K/E25K domains from Solaris 9 09/04 to Solaris 9 09/05 in order to get
support for those nifty US-IV+ 1500Mhz Uniboards.

Most of these systems run with Veritas encapsulated bootdisks on two S1
arrays and I was wondering if there was a slight chance that it might be
possible to do an installtion upgrade of the Solaris OE without
de-encapsulating root.

First of all, let me state a few things:
- Yes, I know about Live Upgrade and it is a nice piece of technology
which is already in use here.
- Yes, I know about rootdisk de-encapsulation/re-rencapsulation to go
along the Solaris OE upgrade.
- Yes, I realize that the current Solaris OE installation upgrades are
much more reliable now than those from a few years back (/etc/system gets
preserved and so are /etc/name_to_major et al...)
- Yes, I wouldn't dare doing that if I was upgrading to a different major
release.

SunSolve/Google searches and previous experiences haven't turned up a
definitive answer as to wether this might work or not.

So here's the current plan:

- Make sure to vxmksdpart all of the needed slices (rootvol, swapvol, var)
on both rootdisk and rootmirror.
- Dis-associate the rootmirror plexes (vxplex dis)
- Remove EMC PowerPath.
- Reduce vfstab to a bare minimum (rootvol,var,swapvol) and revert to
/dev/{dsk,rdsk}/ for these partitions (that's the hack).
- Start a Solaris OE installation from the network and pick 'Upgrade'
instead of 'Initial'. Choose not to auto-reboot, inspect the files moved
by the installation scripts from under /a.
- Restore the original vfstab (that with VxVM) and start a reboot
procedure.
- The new OS will hopefully come up with its rootdg and rootdisk. Once
deemed stable, the rootmirror plexes would be re-attached.
- Re-install EMC PowerPath.

>From what I have seen, recent Solaris OE 'upgrades' (9 09/04 -> 09/05; 10
03/05 -> 10 01/06 or 10 06/06) with SVM-encapsulated bootdisks function
just fine. In this scenario, I am choosing not to tell the Solaris
installer about VxVM and think/hope it will just ignore it.

Any ideas, recommendations, feedback from experience?

I will post the complete HOWTO when finished (if this works out).

-- 
,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,
Vincent S. Cojot, Computer Engineering. STEP project. _.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~
Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Comite Micro-Informatique. _.,-*~'`^`'~*-,.
Linux Xview/OpenLook resources page _.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'
http://step.polymtl.ca/~coyote  _.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._ coyote@NOSPAM4cojot.name
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.       - Robert Frost
_______________________________________________
sunmanagers mailing list
sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Wed Apr 09 2008 - 23:41:08 EDT