Chapter 29 Upgrading a Solaris 10 System That Has Installed Non-Global Zones

This chapter provides information about how to upgrade your Solaris 10 system to a later release if you are running Solaris Zones. Links to appropriate Solaris installation documents are provided.

What's New in This Chapter for Solaris 10 8/07?

Solaris Live Upgrade is now supported on a system with zones installed. The zonepath cannot be on ZFS.

What's New in This Chapter for Solaris 10 10/08?

Solaris Live Upgrade support on systems with the zonepath on ZFS starts with this release. For a zone with the zonepath on ZFS, only Solaris Live Upgrade can be used to upgrade the system.

You can use the Solaris Live Upgrade feature to migrate your zones to a ZFS root file system. A zone in a non-shared file system is automatically migrated when the UFS root file system is migrated to a ZFS root file system. If the zone is in a shared UFS file system, then you must upgrade the zone as in previous Solaris releases. For more information, see Migrating a UFS Root File System to a ZFS Root File System (Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade) in Oracle Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

Backing Up Your System Before Performing an Upgrade

You should back up the global and non-global zones on your Solaris system before you perform the upgrade. See About Backing Up a Solaris System With Zones Installed and Backing Up a Solaris System With Installed Zones for information.

Upgrading a System With Installed Zones to Solaris 10 8/07 and Later Update Releases

You can use Solaris Live Upgrade, the standard Solaris interactive installation program, or the custom JumpStart installation program to upgrade your Solaris system with zones installed. For information, see Upgrading With Non-Global Zones in Solaris 10 8/07 Installation Guide: Planning for Installation and Upgrade. When the zonepath is on ZFS, also see What's New in This Chapter for Solaris 10 8/07? and What's New in This Chapter for Solaris 10 10/08?.

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.

Upgrading a System With Installed Zones to Solaris 10 6/06 or Solaris 10 11/06

Read Zones With an fs Resource Defined With a Type of lofs Cannot Be Upgraded to the Solaris 10 11/06 Release before upgrading your system.

You can use either the standard Solaris interactive installation program or the custom JumpStart installation program to upgrade your Solaris system with zones installed. Solaris Live Upgrade is not supported for this release. For information, see Solaris 10 11/06 Installation Guide: Solaris Live Upgrade and Upgrade Planning and Solaris 10 11/06 Installation Guide: Custom JumpStart and Advanced Installations.

• The overall planning information and requirements for all types of installations and upgrades are documented in Chapter 4, System Requirements, Guidelines, and Upgrade (Planning), in Solaris 10 11/06 Installation Guide: Planning for Installation and Upgrade. Note that the media used for the installation must be either a DVD or a network installation image created from a DVD.

• The Solaris 10 release interface is documented in Solaris 10 11/06 Installation Guide: Basic Installations.

• The special considerations and limitations for custom JumpStart installations are described in Chapter 8, Custom JumpStart (Reference), in Solaris 10 11/06 Installation Guide: Custom JumpStart and Advanced Installations.

• Information on performing an installation or upgrade over the network is provided in Solaris 10 11/06 Installation Guide: Network-Based Installations.