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Guidelines for Using Solaris Live Upgrade With Solaris Zones

February 2008

This tech tip is based on the Zones and Containers FAQ on OpenSolaris. Live Upgrade support for systems with zones installed was added in the Solaris 10 08/07 OS (Update 4).

There are a number of considerations when using Live Upgrade on a system with Solaris Zones installed. It is critical to avoid zone state transitions during lucreate and lumount operations.

• When you use lucreate to produce an alternate boot environment (ABE), if a given zone is not running, then the zone cannot be booted until the lucreate operation has completed.
• When you use lucreate to produce an ABE, if a given zone is running, it should not be halted or rebooted until the lucreate operation has completed.
• When an ABE is lumounted, you cannot boot zones or reboot them, although zones that were running before the lumount operation can continue to run.

Because a non-global zone can be controlled by a non-global zone administrator as well as by the global zone administrator, it is best to halt all zones during lucreate or lumount operations.

It is important to note that when Live Upgrade operations are underway, non-global zone administrator involvement is critical. The upgrade affects the administrators' work, and they will be addressing the changes that occur as a result of the upgrade. The admins should make sure that any local packages are stable throughout the sequence, handle any post-upgrade tasks such as configuration file adjustments, and generally schedule around the system outage.

Here is an example of a problem that could occur if these guidelines are not followed. If the following sequence of actions takes place:

1. In global zone: lucreate -n new
2. In non-global zone: pkgadd SalesTool
3. In global zone: luupgrade -n new, luactivate -n new, init 6

For more information on Solaris Zones, see System Administration Guide: Solaris Containers--Resource Management and Solaris Zones.

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