Solaris 10 liveupgrade/ABE advice

Hi all,

I have got a few questions on the above topic ->

q1) if my intention for creating an ABE is just to use for patching / patchset update -
e.g. ./installpatchset -B secondboot --s10patchset
luactivate secondboot

What is the recommendation that my ABE should consist of ? and why ?
a) a separate device/slice for the / filesystem
b) a separate device/slice for / and swap
c) a separate device/slice for / , swap and /zones

q2) Does luactivate make changes the "boot-device" variable in OBP ?

Reason being I have a svm mirrordisk on /
md1 (PBE) - disk0, disk1
md2 (ABE) - disk2,disk3

boot-device - disk0, disk1

q3) if i luactivate ABE, what will my "boot-device" look likes ?

boot-device - disk2,disk0 ?

Regards,
Noob

ok so we do this in LDOMS but the principal is the same thing..

you'll need a separate slice for /.

what we do is we have two slices (1 and 3) for / be's and a third slice (4) for zones.

what LUactivate does is change the boot status in lustatus to switch on reboot. the boot dev should be what ever is set in lustatus.

so if by logical extension you have / on a mirror and that mirror is md1 /slice 1 your OBP boot device would be md1:a.

If you're using a ZFS boot, I've always liked creating new BEs in a different ZFS pool than the BE it's being copied from. If you put the new BE in the same ZFS pool, all that's done is making the new BE a clone of a ZFS snapshot. Over time, with each new BE made for patches/upgrades, the trail of snapshots and clones becomes unmanageable.

If you put the new BE in a different ZFS pool, the new BE is completely independent of the old one and a lot easier to manage.

That does mean you need two bootable ZFS pools, but I think it's worth it if you keep your servers up-to-date with a new BE every time a new patch set or upgrade is released.

Also make certain that users' home directories are not part of the boot environment. Users don't like having to use old copies of their home directories that were made when the BE was created.

doesn't beadm exist in Solaris 10?

Not under that name - pre-Solaris 11, it's the lu family of commands.

even for ZFS?