On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 02:20:27PM -0600, Kelly Sauke wrote: > Maybe I need a little clarification of what Live Upgrade does. I've > gotten a lot of response of what I would call installer utilities but > not a Live Upgrade (if I'm wrong please point it out to me). What Live > Upgrade does under solaris is it creates a complete alternate boot > environment with a root /usr /var and any other filesystem you want. > Then you can apply patches etc to this other boot environment and boot > off of that. If there is something in the patch that doesn't work or > screws up the machine, then you just reboot off the original boot > environment and you're back to where you were before upgrading and still > have access to the patched boot environment to fix it. Its great for > upgrading production type servers because the 'back out plan' if you > will is nothing more than reboot off the old boot environment. In other > words you have 2 / filesystems, 2 /usr's, 2 /var's as well as 2 > kernels. Its a complete boot environment copy that you can do anything > to and then just reboot off the new environment without having to touch > the 'live' environment.
I've used live upgrade, but I've had the best luck with cloning disks and upgrading the clone offline. If all goes well you can swap in the new disk, usually a bigger size than the old one (big win). This works well regardless of OS/platform. -- Nate Campi http://www.campin.net
