We have a v240 running Solaris 10, and an application that I don't want to go through the pain of reinstalling on a new system right now.
Can I just move those disks to a v440 for an easy upgrade?
At first I thought the idea was laughable, but then I started thinking that they are both Ultra Sparc III, and it might be possible.
Any thoughts (or even laughs) are appreciated. Thanks...Lyle
Can you NFS mount the disks on the v240 onto the v440? Sooner or later that v240 will have to go away, but it buys you time.
I do not know, but assuming the disks are formatted to ufs filesystems, I do know that back in the 90's you could move disks between some different Sparcstations. The only issues were between different versions of ufs. Don't know about ZFS, or disk controllers.
The easy way would be to backup and restore to the new system. Assuming licensure will still work.
You could try to migrate the Solaris 10 server to the anther Solaris 10 or 11 server as a zone. If the application is already in a zone it should be even easier.
Thanks for the reply, Jim.
The issue is really wanting to preserve applications, libraries, etc that are already installed, and avoid reinstalling (assuming I could even find them) on a fresh Solaris disk.
Licensing may be an issue on a different machine. But I too remember being able to move disks between different Sun machines in the same class.
Of course, if bus structure or controllers are different, it's not going to work. But I thought a v240 and v440 might be close enough.
Any more thoughts from the Community? Thanks....Lyle
Disks are using the same interface and technology so would be pluggable on the new system. If they are the system disks, I wouldn't bet they successfully boot on the v440 though without some tweaking.
As an alternative, you should consider flash archives which are designed to clone a system to another.
Just swapping the disks from one platform to the other won't boot but it can be made to work with a bit of engineering, ie, booting single user and editing files on your hard disk filesystem.
The platforms are different so:
Your network interfaces will be different hardware
Your disk controllers will be different and resulting devices (c0t0d0, etc) will be different (this one prevents booting even with errors).
Stuff like vfstab, system file, bootblock, (filesystem) device names, will need sorting running under single user, followed by a boot -r to reconfigure everything (to get Solaris to do the rest of the work!!)
Here's a thread that was started by a member going the other way (by restoring his V440 ufsdumps to a V240) which I subscribed to in helping to sort the issues.............
Hope that helps.
it worked for me 
Hi lyle,
I see beta17 has joined this thread; this is someone who's actually done it albeit in the reverse direction.
I also see jlliagre on the thread too. Vast experience.
This shows the power of a good forum. You have comprehensive firepower available to help you with a lot of expertise if you decide to give it a go.
And that doesn't include moderators!!!
Are you just wanting to pull the disks from one server to the next?
It should work fine if.. you loaded the system with Full OEM and you do a reconfig boot. They are both of the same CPU arch so you should be fine. As long as the FULL OEM was loaded you will have all the drivers needed to run the system.
If that makes you nervous you could zfs snapshots and or flash archives to move the system.