This is the upgrade path I've worked out for migrating from an 08/07
host using SVM to mirror the internal disks to running 10/08 with ZFS
mirroring the internal disks ... each and every step seems reasonable to
me, however it involves about four complete copies of the data on the
disks which seems excessive ... is there an easier way to perform this
upgrade?

In this case, the mirrored disks are A and B, A is the original boot
disk.

- download the DVD .iso of Solaris 10 10/08 and burn it to disc or make
it available by NFS ... 

- update the Live Upgrade tools:
  - remove SUNWluu, SUNWlur (and SUNWlucfg if it exists)
  - add SUNWlucfg, SUNWlur, and SUNWluu from the Solaris DVD (and maybe
  SUNWbzip)
  - apply any outstanding required patches for Live Upgrade (which may
  require a reboot)

- use Live Upgrade to create an alternate boot environment BE1 on disk B
by detaching some of your SVM mirrors (BE0 is your original environment)
- use Live Upgrade to update the OS in BE1
- boot into BE1, test your box for good function
- declare the upgrade part 1 a success/fail
 
If part 1 is a fail:

- boot into BE0 on disk A
- delete BE1 on disk B
- clear, re-create and re-attach the metadisk mirror subdisks on disk B
and wait for it to resync 

If part 1 is a success, move on to part 2:

- delete BE0 on disk A
- clear the subdisks and metaDB on disk A
- create a single slice 0 covering the whole of disk A
- create a ZFS pool and assign slice 0 of disk A to it
- use live upgrade to create BE2 with ZFS root pool and migrate data
from BE1 and away from disk B
- boot into BE2, test your box for good function
- declare the upgrade part 2 a success/fail

If part 2 is a fail:

- boot into BE1 on disk B
- delete BE2 on disk A
- clear, re-create and re-attach the metadisk mirror subdisks on disk A
and wait for it to resync 

If part 2 is a success:

- delete BE1 on disk B
- clear the subdisks and metaDB on disk B
- create a single slice 0 covering the whole of disk B
- add this slice to the ZFS root pool and wait for it to sync (resilver
in ZFS parlance)

Other details in there such as how to manage disk labels and getting
your bootblocks correct are left as an exercise for the reader ... :)

... surely there is an easier way to do this?  At least the tasks can be
broken down into staged events, so the individual outages don't get too
huge, but it's an annoyingly large amount of work ... not to mention the
sheer amount of time waiting for various mirrors to synchronise.

About the only manner in which I could see this being in any way shorter
would be to have some sort of Solaris 10 10/08 LiveCD environment where
you would have access to all the tools you need in order to do the
upgrade in one hit ... haven't heard of anything like this, but on
thinking about it, it's a damn good idea ... single-user mode from the
DVD doesn't appear to allow the SVM management stuff to work, at least
I've not got it to that point yet ... 

Regards,
Malcolm

-- 
Malcolm Herbert                                This brain intentionally
mjch at mjch.net                                                left blank


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