There is a blueprint available on Patching mirrored systems using live upgrade. This document will take you through the steps needed to create an alternate boot environment and how to patch it.
Why bother? Well by using Live Upgrade you can drastically reduce downtime as you are applying patches to a non-running boot environment. You just need one reboot to make everything active. If you run into problems you can easily reboot back into the unpatched environment.
A couple of comments that didn’t make it into the final doc:
1. I would always recommend using the ‘-c’ option to lucreate to label your current boot environment. lucreate will try and give it a sensible name (d0 in the blueprint examples), but naming this yourself makes things clearer.
2. Solaris 10 can order patches automatically for you. So if you just want to add all the patches in a directory you don’t need the order file. ‘cd /path/to/patch; luupgrade -t -n "New_BE" -s /path/to/patch *’ will do the job.
3. The blueprint focusses on the EIS CD, however you can also use LU to just apply a single patch. eg ‘luupgrade -n newroot -t -s /export/patches 987654-32‘
4. If for some reason you need to remove a patch LU can do this for you also using ‘luupgrade -T‘.
Even if you don’t currently use mirrored root filesystems it is worth taking a look at this blueprint as the Live Upgrade methodology is the same for all systems.
Thanks for this Albert, will be using it in a Production environment, so I hope it all goes well. Will be keeping an eye on your blog from now on…
Cheers,
Ciaran
Does Live Upgrade support non-global zones yet? Either in Nevada or an official Solaris release?