Solaris live upgrade

Solaris live upgrade can be used not only to upgrade the OS but also it provides a easiest way to deploy the patch with the minimal downtime and better rollback approach.

Before you perform the live upgrade activity, install the latest live upgrade packages on your current OS and remove the old package which requires as  release of the live upgrade package must match the release of the OS you are upgrading to otherwise the live upgrade will fail

There are three packages which are to be reinstalled .

SUNWluu, SUNWlur and SUNWlucfg
# pkgrm SUNWlucfg SUNWluu SUNWlur
 

and while installing the package it has to be in the following order

#pkgadd -d path_to_packages SUNWlucfg SUNWlur SUNWluu

The above steps can be performed by running liveupgrade10 utility which is available under Tools/Installer directory on your CDROM

I have another spare disk where i am going to perform the live upgrade. Below is the output of format output

       0. c1t0d0
          /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@0,0
       1. c1t1d0
          /pci@0,0/pci15ad,1976@10/sd@1,0


Active disk is c1t0d0 so i am going to perform the 

upgrade on the second disk c1t1d0.

Steps1 : Create the partition table as it is on c1t0d0

         prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s2 | fmthard -s - /dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s2

Below is the output of df -h 

/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0      7.7G   3.0G   4.7G    39%    /
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s5      3.8G    69M   3.7G     2%    /var
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s6      4.8G   2.5G   2.3G    52%    /opt
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s7      1.9G   2.0M   1.8G     1%    /opt/support

Steps 2: Once the disk is ready, create alternate boot environment

#lucreate -c Solaris10-9 -n Solaris10-10 -m /:/dev/dsk/c1t1d0s0:ufs -m -:/dev/dsk/c1t1d0s1:swap -m /var:/dev/dsk/c1t1d0s5:ufs -m /opt:/dev/dsk/c1t1d0s6:ufs -m /opt/support:/dev/dsk/c1t1d0s7:ufs

Steps 3: With the above steps you have alternate boot environment, now its turn to upgrade the ABE(Alternate Boot Environment)