Live Upgrade Introduction

The Live Upgrade provides a method of upgrading a system while the system continues to operate. While your current boot environment is running, you can duplicate the boot environment, then upgrade the duplicate. Or, rather than upgrading, you can install a Flash Archive on a boot environment. The original system configuration remains fully functional and unaffected by the upgrade or installation of an archive. When you are ready, you can activate the new boot environment by rebooting the system. If a failure occurs, you can quickly revert to the original boot environment with a simple reboot. This switch eliminates the normal downtime of the test and evaluation process.

The Live Upgrade enables you to duplicate a boot environment without affecting the currently running system. You can then do the following:

• Upgrade a system.

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  Note - Starting with the Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 release, the upgrade process is impacted by Auto Registration, a feature of Oracle Solaris. See Auto Registration Impact for Live Upgrade.

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• Change the current boot environment's disk configuration to different file system types, sizes, and layouts on the new boot environment.

• Maintain numerous boot environments with different images. For example, you can create one boot environment that contains current patches and create another boot environment that contains an Update release.

Some understanding of basic system administration is necessary before using Live Upgrade. For background information about system administration tasks such as managing file systems, mounting, booting, and managing swap, see the System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.