Dave Miner wrote:
> James Carlson wrote:
>> Maybe someday someone will figure out a way to do automate at least some
>> of the conversion process, but I wouldn't want to hold my breath
>> waiting, or (for that matter) camp out on the dying SX:CE branch hoping
>> that it'll be "fixed" before it fades to black.
>>
>
> The ability to install side-by-side into an existing pool is planned. A
> post-installation script to migrate configuration files is a
> possibility, but there are no definitive plans. Need for these sorts of
> features will be evaluated based on migrating Solaris 10 customers to
> Solaris Next.
Side-by-side installation would be a little helpful, but, really, not a
great deal. The very difficult part of migrating is getting the
software configuration (both the selection of packages, and the detailed
configuration of services) right after installing the new system.
Many systems have a mirrored root, so migration today consists of
breaking the mirror, installing on one half, then importing the other
half as a separate zpool, and transferring over. That takes maybe a
couple hours at most. Reconfiguring the system so that it does
everything the old one did, and verifying all of it, takes hours, days,
or even weeks, depending on how much infrastructure you have to support
reinstalls.
I've done three of them so far, and it's like a summer motorcycle ride.
You end up picking bugs out of your teeth for what seems like
_forever_. ("Oh, yeah; I forgot I had a special cron job for that ...
I'll have to copy that over.")
A side-by-side option would simplify the first part of the trick (and
make it much easier on single-disk people), but the really hard part
isn't present.
--
James Carlson 42.703N 71.076W <carlsonj at workingcode.com>
