Guidelines for Using Solaris Live Upgrade with Solaris Zones

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

• When you use the lucreate command to produce an alternate boot environment (ABE), if a given zone is not running, then the zone cannot be booted until the lucreate has completed.

• When you use the lucreate command to produce an ABE, if a given zone is running, it should not be halted or rebooted until the lucreate has completed.

• When an ABE is mounted by lumount, 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.

When Live Upgrade operations are underway, non-global zone administrator involvement is critical. The upgrade affects the work of the administrators, who will be addressing the changes that occur as a result of the upgrade. Zone administrators should ensure 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.