Thursday October 19, 2006

Demand free upgrades!

One of the barriers to getting customers to upgrade to a new version of software is usually the time it takes, the risks of the process and of course application support. I remember many years ago upgrading servers in the middle of the night with half inch tapes and later on cdroms whirring as the upgrade ran. The backups one had to take beforehand. Thankfully things are better now but I want to evangelise some technology that takes a lot of the pain away from upgrading.

Sun calls the software Live Upgrade. For non technical folks it basically means you perform the upgrade while the system is still doing the job that you bought it to do without interruption to the service. Once you are happy with the upgrade process result you then reboot your server and you are then running the upgraded system. The main win for this is that if for some reason you have to return to the old version you just reboot off the old disk. Live Upgrade handles these Boot environments with handy aliases so you can remember what to boot from to get what version. Older versions did not support mirrored boot disks but these are now supported.

You don't need to be upgrading Solaris to take advantage of Live Upgrade. You can install packages, patches using it and then bring them into production when you are ready. It takes the risk out of these processes and enables a fall back recovery process for free. If you manage Solaris systems I strongly suggest you take a look at it today.

There is lots more information at these two web sites here and here