Live Upgrade is one of the most useful Solaris features, yet in my travels around the US I still don't see it used as much as I would like. I can think of several reasons for this - not all of them totally valid

• I tried it once a long time ago and a patch or package that wasn't LU aware messed up my current boot environment. Not valid for Solaris components although we do see the occasional partner product with this problem. The last one I saw was the NVidia driver, and the good folks from NVidia fixed it very quickly once reported.
• The documentation can be a bit intimidating. Valid with a capital V. But Live Upgrade is an amazingly flexible feature, so at some point you do have to describe these capabilities. As a guide through this documentation, several folks have blogged managable howto guides. You can find mine back in March 2007, although I've recently updated it. And there are other good blogs with plentry of examples. There is a very good Blueprint on Live Upgrade.
• It doesn't work with the Veritas Volume Manager.
• I didn't know about Live Upgrade. Well, you do now. But I have noticed that a lot of the Solaris conversation is focused on new features, like ZFS, Zones, SMF, DTrace and some of the older features like Flash archives and Live Upgrade don't receive the attention they deserve. The simple fact is that Live Upgrade takes all of the pain out of the patching process, at least once you know what to patch.

And I'm sure there are other reasons, but these are the ones I hear most often.

Let's turn our attention to the topic at hand, upgrading a Solaris 10 11/06 system to 8/07, without zones. This example will be on an x64 system, but the SPARC approach is simular.

If you have read my earlier blog on Live Upgrade, you will recall the process is

1. Read Infodoc Infodoc 72099 and install any required patches
2. Install the LU packages SUNWluu SUNWlur and SUNWlucfg (if present) from the installation media
3. lurename(1m) if you want to change the name of your new boot environment
4. lumake(1m) or ludelete(1m) + lucreate(1m) to repopulate the target boot environment with the proper software and configuration files
5. luupgrade(1m) to upgrade the target boot environment
6. luactivate(1m) to activate the new boot environment
7. init 0 to perform the file synchronization and conversions, create the new boot archive and update your GRUB menu

So I fire up my web browser and run over to SunSolve to pick up Infodoc 72099 and see a rather large set of patches. And there are two lists, one for systems with non-global zones and one without. Since we're looking at a system without non-global zones we will start with the shorter of the two lists (the next article will cover systems with nonglobal zones).

Apparently we need patches

	 
Solaris 10 	x86 	118816-03 or higher 	nawk patch 	 
Solaris 10 	x86 	120901-03 or higher 	libzonecfg patch 	 
Solaris 10 	x86 	121334-04 or higher 	SUNWzoneu required patch 	 
Solaris 10 	x86 	119255-42 or higher 	patchadd/patchrm patches 	 
Solaris 10 	x86 	119318-01 or higher 	SVr4 Packaging Commands (usr) Patch 	 
Solaris 10 	x86 	117435-02 or higher 	biosdev patch for GRUB Boot 	 

Reboot after installation 	 

Solaris 10 	x86 	120236-01 or higher 	SUNWluzone required patches 	 
Solaris 10 	x86 	121429-08 or higher 	SUNWluzone required patches 	 
Solaris 10 	x86 	121003-03 or higher 	pax patch 	 
Solaris 10 	x86 	123122-02 or higher 	prodreg patch 	 
Solaris 10 	x86 	121005-03		sh patch 	 
Solaris 10 	x86 	119043-10		/usr/sbin/svccfg patch 	 
Solaris 10 	x86 	121902-02		i.manifest r.manifest class action script patch 	 
Solaris 10 	x86 	120901-03		libzonecfg patch 	 
Solaris 10 	x86 	120069-03		telnet security patch 	 
Solaris 10 	x86 	120070-02		cpio patch 	 
Solaris 10 	x86 	123333-01		tftp patch

Hmmm, seems like a lot of patches and a required reboot! So I fire up our new friend updatemanager to patch my system. I see that there is a new updatemanager patch available (121119-13), so I installed that one all by itself and restarted updatemanager.

I soon realize that my choice of patching tools is making this a bit challenging. Users of patch tools such as Patch Check Advanced(PCA) may have an easier time, but I was determined to do this with updatemanager, with occasional help from the patch READMEs in SunSolve.

The list of patches required for this upgrade applies to any release of Solaris 10. A fresh install of a Solaris 10 11/06 system only needed the following four patches - which is a lot better than I first thought.

	 
119255-42	 
121429-08
126539-01 as it replaces the required 121902-02
125419-01 as it replaces the required 120069-03

The difficulty with updatemanager was with the set of obsoleted patches. Something like the required 121902-02 that was obsoleted by 126539-01 which was installed took a bit of manual trolling through patch READMEs. So I'll save you the research - it came down to only the four above patches.

One important note: the required reboot after patch 117435-02 wasn't needed after all - so I'll try to save all of you Solaris 10 11/06 users one reboot. While I have your attention, it is a good idea, if not a best practice, to install patch and packaging patches separately.

Feeling a lot better about this process, I proceed and install the four required patches using updatemanager in two steps (119255-42 and then the other three patches) and all succeeded, as expected. All that was left to do was finish the standard procedure

# mount -o ro -F hsfs `lofiadm -a /export/iso/s10u4/solarisdvd.iso` /mnt 
# pkgadd -d /mnt/Solaris_10/Product SUNWlur SUNWluu SUNWlucfg 
# lurename -e nv71 -n s10u4 
# lumake -n s10u4 
# luupgrade -u -s /mnt -n s10u4 
# luactivate s10u4 
# init 0 

And all went as expected. Next time I will tackle the longer list of patches and examine the same upgrade path, but with nonglobal zones.

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