We actually migrated from encapsulated root disks to SVM as a part of live upgrade a few years ago. It was not hard as long as you have a well-documented procedure. It is better to test the procedure on a test environment. I love live upgrade. It is easy to roll back via booting from original BE. Of course, everything is easy after you become comfortable with it. I could see you migrating away from solaris form budget point of view, but patch management should not be the reason. Support will be better for solaris than open solaris/linux.
Thanks Ying Xu <[email protected]> Unix Group Office: 713-218-4508 BB: 832-671-6633 4828 Loop Central Dr. Houston TX 77081 -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jones, Dave Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 1:12 PM To: PCA (Patch Check Advanced) Discussion Subject: Re: [pca] [OT] OpenSolaris / IPS support & patching Thanks for the reply Kevin. That answered a few of my questions. The root disk encapsulation is the big part of the problem with VxVM. One of many poor choices on the part of the original design team. I can roll-back the kernel (or any other) patches in Linux as well, without snapshots at all. In fact, rolling back a kernel patch is just a matter of rebooting into one of several older kernels as you probably know. Not that it makes Linux superior somehow but I was just pointing it out. I think I will roll OpenSolaris out on some old hardware we have and let some of the App & Dev teams play around with it to get their feedback. Few better ways see how easy it is to break something that to give it to the users. ;-) Thanks again, Dave -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bliss, Kevin L Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 12:40 PM To: 'PCA (Patch Check Advanced) Discussion' Subject: Re: [pca] [OT] OpenSolaris / IPS support & patching See in line comments. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jones, Dave Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 10:24 AM To: PCA (Patch Check Advanced) Discussion Subject: [pca] [OT] OpenSolaris / IPS support & patching Hi Team. This is a bit off-topic but I have a few questions about OpenSolaris as it regards to to support & patching. I thought someone on the list (maybe even Don) might know the answers. 1) Do the Sun support subscriptions for OpenSolaris offer the same levels and types of support as they do for Solaris? <kb> Don't know 2) Is anyone on the list running OpenSolaris in th place of Solaris on Test/Dev/Prod? If so what are your experiences? <kb> Just use it on workstations currently, very pleased with it and can't wait until IPS move in Solaris! 3) Does IPS/OpenSolaris/Sun still "require" you perform patch installs in Single User mode on OpenSolaris? <kb> No, single user is not required. Patching is very much like linux. As of the last time I patched you did have to reboot after kernel patch. We are strongly considering migrating off of Sun if we cannot get out of the 8 - 12 hour patch windows we currently need to patch some of our systems. <kb> Agreed, Sun needs to get moving on this issue. Live Upgrade is not an option because of several factors in our environment, including excapsulated root disks with VxVM and several containers per host. <kb> live upgrade is VxVM aware, this is not an issue. If your containers are on separate disk groups that are visible to more than one server (SAN, NAS, etc), migrate the containers to another server (2 to 10 minutes for most containers) then patch the server, then migrate back. If you move to ZFS you save money and it is just as easy or easier to migrate containers and lu is much easier. We cannot justify staying on Solaris under these conditions when Linux allows us to patch the whole box in minutes while still at run level 3. In fact, with Ksplice we do not even need to reboot to change kernels in Linux anymore. <kb> That is nice, but in the event of a bad patch is there an easy roll back. ZFS on solaris allows for a snapshot to roll back to even if you don't use LU. 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