We are in the process of setting up a service consisting of SAN based global storage which will host a number of ZFS based zones, each running an application that must be nade highly avalable. The zones are made highly available using Solaris Cluster and failover. This is all rather standard and is described in the Sun zone/cluster docs. For technical reasons all the zones will be full root zones.
However, we are having trouble finding a safe patching procedure that minimises application downtime. The zone docs tell us that a zone should be maintained as the same patch level as the global zone, but in a cluster this seems impossible without a total break in service. At some point the app zones will be running on one of the global zones forming the cluster but with mismatched patches. The "patch on attach" facility will be nice but is it going to work in a cluster. Will the cluster notice that the zone is very slow booting up and treat it as a failure? Even if cluster doesn't care, the apps are still down while the zone is being patched. Is there a soution that I've missed? Thanks, _______________________________________________ zones-discuss mailing list zones-discuss@opensolaris.org
