At a previous job most of their Sparc systems were upgraded from Solaris 2.6->8->10 via live upgrade. Obviously new systems got the latest standard, and not every system that went from 2.6->8 was still around to do the 8->10 upgrade, but at one point we had around 1200 sparc systems (all servers, no desktops) that we maintained in our department (with three other groups of similar size). The reduced downtime of the update was _critical_ in allowing this to happen (otherwise the business would force us to run ancient versions forever). This was probably one of the few things that kept them from tossing Sun out the door completely (which at one point they were trying to do) -- since they were obsessed with system availability (to a sometimes absurd extent), it provide a very distinct advantage over the AIX and HP-UX systems they had.
I suspect they would be quite disappointed (to put it mildly) if there is no way to do something similar (at least an installer that can run in an older version to lay down the bits in unused space). Since the hardware, OS versions (including patches), as well as other software was tested and controlled rather carefully, we had very few problems with this. On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 4:44 PM, Ian Collins <[email protected]> wrote: > On 07/23/10 06:44 AM, Bart Smaalders wrote: >> >> On 07/21/10 15:25, Ian Collins wrote: >>> >>> If Solaris Next is to be IPS based, I really really hope we will see a >>> viable upgrade path. The lack of one is the biggest hurdle to IPS >>> adoption. >>> >> >> In general, upgrading from UFS root w/ svr4 packages to ZFS root w/ IPS is >> a very difficult problem. While we can imagine cases in which we >> could be successful, there are a host of situations which are not >> readily addressable. Add to this the fact that most of Sun >> ^H^H^HOracle's Solaris customers generally do NOT upgrade from one >> release to the next, because of the reproducibility problem - production >> machine configurations need to be readily reproducible, and upgrading >> an existing S10 patched OS is not the best way of doing this. >> > I can see that's probably true. I only ever upgraded one production box > from Solaris 9 to 10 and that was a very simple configuration. > > Nearly all of the other production Solaris 9 boxes I've replaced have been > migration for their services to Solaris 10 zones. The small remainder have > been imported to branded zones. So I guess Robert is right, a branded zone > is one option! > > I do wonder how much of a selling point (to keep people on Solaris) the > ability to upgrade was, even it wasn't used? > >> We anticipate developing and sharing migration strategies and tools, >> but a traditional upgrade in place DVD approach is not likely to occur. >> > That's good. > > The traditional upgrade in place DVD approach has probably reached the end > of the line with the increasing use of virtualisation. Treating a system > (or zone) as a service and looking at how to migrate that is better > approach. > > -- > Ian. > > _______________________________________________ > opensolaris-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
