The perfect occasion to live upgrade

I'm a big fan of Solaris Live Upgrade. I regularly live upgrade new Solaris Nevada builds onto my company's Acer Ferrari 4000 laptop and it's just sooo convenient.

But there are so many customers and other Solaris users out there who still haven't tried live upgrading yet. You know, you're buried in work and you never quite had the time to try it out or read the manual or you simply don't know that it exists etc.

Today, I visited my old university's computing center, the Clausthal University Compute Center and did a Solaris workshop for the campus admins there. What better place and time is there to do a live upgrade than actually doing it while you present?

So this morning we started the Solaris workshop by introducing the three flavours of Solaris: OpenSolaris, the development project; Solaris Express, it's 2-weekly binary release and Solaris 10 the current production release. Since everybody attending the workshop will want to upgrade a Solaris machine sooner or later, why not do it now?

The first golden rule of live upgrading is: Install the new release's live upgrade packages. I had Nevada build 59 with me, so a few pkgadd(1M)s later, that was done. Then lucreate(1M) started it's job of copying my current boot environment into a free slice on my laptop's disk, while I continued with our workshop.

We covered some basics on Solaris 10 and four in-depth segments about SMF, DTrace, ZFS and Zones (and Containers). About halfway through our workshop, lucreate was finished and so we started luupgrade(1M) with a loopback mounted image of the Nevada 59 DVD. Just after we finished our workshop (4 hours total), live upgrade was finished as well and we all gathered around my laptop, watching it reboot into a freshly upgraded Nevada build 59 boot environment :).

Solaris Live Upgrade is one of those things that you postpone for so long, then you finally try it and after you've done it once, you can't imagine living without it. I hope you've become curious now, just like my workshop attendees today, and that you'll soon try it out as well. Of course if it isn't already a part of your everyday life as it should be...

P.S.: Now I'm sitting in my friend Ingo's house and he has this notebook that his wife's granddad gave her and his friend Yi is coming by tonight and guess what we'll do next: Install Solaris Nevada onto that notebook. It's a Medion MD6100 and I've already found the corresponding driver CD with the missing SIS900 network driver on the net so installation should be quite easy...

"The perfect occasion to live upgrade" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-03-16 10:02:04.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
nevada opensolaris solaris
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