I am new to using zfs. I have a new Solaris 10 server and I would like to start using live upgrade to help me have a route to "get back to good" if when patching the server things go badly. In my searching so far I have found the following pages and learned a lot...
How to make and mount a clone of the BE to apply patches to:
Patching a live Solaris 10 system with LU, ZFS, and PCA | Probably
Some basics of live upgrade:
11.Maintaining Solaris Live Upgrade Boot Environments (Tasks) (Solaris 10 Installation Guide: Solaris Live Upgrade and Upgrade Planning) - Sun Microsystems
For the purposes of this discussion lets call my live BE Production and the cloned BE I will use to patch Patching. SO if I follow the instruction in the first link above it explains how to get started. Make a cloned boot environment called Patching and mount it up and patch it. Set the box to boot using the Patching BE, reboot and see if all is well. If it is not, I would use this procedure to go back to the old unpatched Production BE:
In case of a failure while booting to the target BE, the following process
needs to be followed to fallback to the currently working boot environment:
- Boot from Solaris failsafe or boot in single user mode from the Solaris
Install CD or Network. - Mount the Parent boot environment root slice to some directory (like /mnt). You can use the following command to mount:
mount -Fzfs /dev/dsk/c0d0s0 /mnt - Run utility with out any arguments from the Parent boot
environment root slice, as shown below:
/mnt/sbin/luactivate - luactivate, activates the previous working boot environment and
indicates the result. - Exit Single User mode and reboot the machine.
(This info is from the first link)
But if it boots OK pointed at the patched Patching BE and all is well then what? At the end of the instructions from the first link I have a server that is booted to the cloned environment and not the "Production" or regular one. So what now?
Here is what I am thinking.
In short copy the changes from BE Patching to BE Production and set it to boot back to Production BE and reboot again...
To do that I would:
- Tell the server to boot back the old way to the unpatched Production boot environment.
- Then use:
lumake -n Production -s Patching
to copy over the changes I have made from the Patching BE to the Production BE. - Unmount the Patching BE and blow it and it's clones away...
Question, is that all there is to it? Do I need to do this in single user mode from the console? Am I missing anything here, this seems too simple to me?