Solaris Live Upgrade Requirements

Solaris Live Upgrade System Requirements

• From a SPARC based system, you can upgrade from the Solaris 2.6, Solaris 7, or Solaris 8 operating environment to the Solaris 8 or Solaris 9 operating environment.

• From an x86 based system, you can upgrade from the Solaris 7 or 8 operating environment to the Solaris 8 or Solaris 9 operating environment.

• You cannot upgrade to the Solaris 7 operating environment.

• You must upgrade to the same release that contained the Solaris Live Upgrade software that you installed on the currently running system. For example, if on your current operating environment, you installed Solaris Live Upgrade from the Solaris 9 release, you must upgrade to the same Solaris 9 release.

Solaris Live Upgrade is included in the Solaris 9 software, but if you want to upgrade from previous releases, you need to install the Solaris Live Upgrade packages on your current operating environment. You can install the Solaris Live Upgrade packages from the following:

• An installer on the Solaris 9 DVD, the Solaris 9 Software 2 of 2 CD, or a net installation image.

• The pkgadd command. If you are using the pkgadd command, the packages are SUNWlur and SUNWluu, and these packages must be installed in that order.

For instructions on installing the Solaris Live Upgrade software, see To Install Solaris Live Upgrade.

Solaris Live Upgrade Disk Space Requirements

Follow general disk space requirements for an upgrade. See Chapter 5, Guidelines for Allocating Disk Space and Swap Space (Planning).

To estimate the file system size that is needed to create a boot environment, start the creation of a new boot environment. The size is calculated. You can then abort the process.

The disk on the new boot environment must be able to serve as a boot device. Some systems restrict which disks can serve as a boot device. Refer to your system's documentation to determine if any boot restrictions apply.

The disk might need to be prepared before you create the new boot environment. Check to make sure the disk is formatted properly:

• Identify slices large enough to hold the file systems to be copied.

• Identify file systems that contain directories that you want to share between boot environments rather than copy. If you want a directory to be shared, you need to create a new boot environment with the directory put on its own slice. The directory is then a file system and can be shared with future boot environments. For more information on creating separate file systems for sharing, see Guidelines for Selecting Slices for Shareable File Systems.

Solaris Live Upgrade Requirements If Creating RAID-1 Volumes (Mirrors)

Solaris Live Upgrade uses Solaris Volume Manager technology to create a boot environment that can contain file systems that are RAID-1 volumes (mirrors). To use the mirroring capabilities of Solaris Live Upgrade, you must create at least one state database and at least three state database replicas. A state database stores information on disk about the state of your Solaris Volume Manager configuration. The state database is a collection of multiple, replicated database copies. Each copy is referred to as a state database replica. When a state database is copied, the replica protects against data loss from single points of failure. For procedures about creating a state database, see “State Database (Overview)” in Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide.

Solaris Live Upgrade does not implement the full functionality of Solaris Volume Manager. Solaris Live Upgrade supports only a RAID-1 volume (mirror) with single-slice concatenations on the root (/) file system. A mirror can be comprised of a maximum of three concatenations. For guidelines on creating mirrored file systems, see Guidelines for Selecting Slices for Mirrored File Systems.