Hi all, I would like to know what is the alternate method of upgrading to Solaris 10 besides using the Live Upgrade from Solaris 8 or 9.
Assume that I don't wish to use the Live Upgrade method.
Best method is to do a fresh install. It may be a pain to do so right now, but it will save you aggravations in the future, plus you'll have a clean start with everything.
Normally I would agree with the previous opinion if that is possible. I do however understand that for various reasons sometimes it is not a viable option and sometimes liveupgrade just isn't what you want to do, so there is a third way. You can do a upgrade by booting from DVD/ uncustomized jumpstart, then choosing "upgrade installation" as the installation type.
It's more or less the same procedure as a live upgrade but without all the synching stuff that happens on first reboot after a live upgrade and can be a bit more reliable than a live upgrade.
Thanks Reborg, so I still need to have a downtime to boot from cdrom and proceed right? I have not tried that but I've got a task for my client to do it on their Prod systems and this was the suggestion they provided to use an "upgrade install". Thx
I'm missing why you rule out live upgrade, especially for a production system.
Directly upgrading the system not only would imply a long downtime period but also wouldn't allow to easily rollback to the previous Solaris release should something goes wrong.
We are planning to break the mirror before doing so. And for live upgrade, you need disk space, which in this case is not available
That make sense. In that case, you can rollback by reverting to the unaffected mirror.
There are reasons why not use LU especially in a production system. Sure it seems easier, but there are many issues that can arise during and after LU. Things like OS standards, security standards, audit/compliance standards, they will be affected by simply upgrading packages and leaving behind a slew of things that don't need to be there.
As for long downtimes, at work I just happen to be in that LU vs fresh install battle, me being on the engineering side waving the fresh install flag, SAs waving the LU is easier falg, and seeing the cases being opened when "something goes wrong" and LU doesn't "successfully upgrade", being asked for assistance to rebuild a server after 3-4 botched LUs, servers reporting the wrong compliance info to auditting SW because some arcane packages were left behind after LU, etc etc etc.
That's vs my method, which is a jumpstart DVD with a highly customized autobuild which includes everything but the actuall production apps, and takes about 20-30 minutes for a full fresh install.
I wasn't really talking about LU vs fresh install but LU vs regular upgrade.
Also, the OP hasn't free disk space to perform a LU, I assume he has neither a spare server for a fresh install.