Here are some important things to consider before you upgrade:

• Patching and Solaris Live Upgrade Limitations
• How to Keep Your Legacy Applications
• Solaris 8 and 9 Support Status
• Different Ways to Upgrade

Patching and Solaris Live Upgrade Limitations

See Restrictions for Using Solaris Live Upgrade for information on Solaris Live Upgrade restrictions and for examples of the correct way to use Solaris Live Upgrade to upgrade from the Solaris 8 or 9 OS to the Solaris 10 OS.

Also see the Patching section of this site.

How to Keep Your Legacy Applications

The Solaris Application Guarantee Program ensures that existing Solaris applications will run unmodified on the Solaris 10 OS. This means that Solaris applications developed ten years ago will run unchanged on the Solaris 10 OS, taking full advantage of new and advanced Solaris features. And, with the Solaris 10 OS, Sun guarantees source code compatibility between SPARC and x86 processors, ensuring applications can run across platforms with a simple recompile.

For more info, see the Legacy Apps section of this site.

Solaris 8 and 9 Support Status

The following pages provide info on the life cycle and status of the Solaris 8 and 9 OS:

• New Solaris and OpenSolaris Operating System Release Model explains the Solaris release life cycle.
• New End of Service Life Status for Solaris Operating System shows the support status of every Solaris release.
• New Solaris 8 Entered End of Service Life Phase 2 explains that it's time to sign up for Solaris 8 Vintage Patch support if you want to continue running your applications on Solaris 8; also see Continue Getting Support for Solaris 8 With Vintage Patch Service on BigAdmin.
• New Info on End of Service Life for Solaris 9 OS and Solaris 9 Transition FAQs provide info on the status of the Solaris 9 OS.
• The Solaris Operating System End-of-Software Support Statements site provides info on features that have been removed from the latest and previous Solaris OS releases, as well as features that might be removed in a future release.

Different Ways to Upgrade

The best way to upgrade depends on your systems, your architecture, and your applications. There are three main ways you can go:

1. Do it yourself.
2. Do it with Sun's help.
3. Let Sun design an end-to-end solution for you.

Sun has best practices and how-to information plus tools and other resources, such as documentation, forums, and training, for customers who want to perform their own upgrade.

For more complex upgrades and migrations, Sun Services experts can help you upgrade to a new IT infrastructure or upgrade to the Solaris 10 OS, while you stay focused on your job. For more info, see the Services and Support section of this site.