Solaris 10 patching - 14 hours!!!

Hi, we have a problem recently with Sun Fire T200 server, when installing 10_SPARC_EIS-Jul09 patchbundle resulted for 14 hours of outage! Steps, that was done by me is pretty straightforward:

reboot -- -s

./installcluster --s10cluster

Then I made 1 reboot after kernel patch was installed (it was 14th or 15th to install, but it took server 2 hours to get to it!), then after restarting to single user mode, system took 14 hours to install ~320 patches!!.

There were no errors, logs are clean and identical system with similar 2 zones with WebSphere running was patched for ~2.5 hours...

Kernel from which I was updating was

5.10 Generic_118833-33 sun4v sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-T200

to the

5.10 Generic_141414-07 sun4v sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-T200

I`m not posting here the output of prtdiag/prtconf, since configs of this servers are identical, and procedure of patching also was the same.

What could cause such disastrous slowness of the patching procedure? Not even mention, that this was production server...

Thanks for your feedback - will appreciate any answer. Thanks.

are there zones configured on your machine? a lot of zones took a lot of time...

yes, there is 4 zones installed - same as the other server (actually 4 of them, with the same config and zones).

again - 4 servers patched itself for ~2 hours, 1 server took enormous 14 hours to do the same work in same configuration state

and that`s what makes me scratch my head..

hmmm, would be interesting to look inside the explorer of the machines to look for the root cause! are the systems under support at sun?

yeah, they are - raising a ticket to sun is that`s what i`m up to right now

but, seems like i`ll patch another similar server tonight, so i`ll get back here with the results.

thank you.

Was the latest 119254 patch installed first on your system ?
Zone parallel patching is a must have.

if you open a ticket drop the ticket number via pm... i'll take a look at problem.

I had the same problem. I switched to using liveupgrade to patch the servers. Of course this only works if the system has a mirrored root environment. If you can get liveupgrade setup and working, you can patch the inactive boot environment. Then the outage will only be as long as it takes to boot the server.

You can also look into detaching the zones before you install the patches, and then doing a zoneadm attach -u to update the zones after the patches are installed in the global.

Yes Live upgrade is definitely the best practice here. Note that with your root file system on ZFS (Solaris 10 10/08 or later update), you no more need a mirrored boot environment. A ZFS clone will be used instead.

Provide the SR number.

Hi, I must apologize for the degree of hysteria in my first post. I was informed the wrong time, that other system with 3 zones took, it was ~9.5 hours; system I was writing about took ~12 hours with 4 zones, so it all make sense.

I`m very eager to try to upgrade system from this June EIS -> October EIS with parallel patching feature.

If it works as it supposed - it really is a timesaver.

Thanks a lot for your replies.

Nik