Guidelines for Using Live Upgrade With Non-Global Zones (Planning)

Planning for using non-global zones includes the limitations described below.

Table 8-1 Limitations When Upgrading With Non-Global Zones

Problem

Description

Consider these issues 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 create an inactive boot environment, if a given non-global zone is not running, then the zone cannot be booted until the lucreate operation has completed.
When you use the lucreate command to create an inactive boot environment if a given non-global zone is running, the zone should not be halted or rebooted until the lucreate operation has completed.
When an inactive boot environment is mounted with the lumount command, you cannot boot non-global 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, to prevent any interaction, halt all zones during lucreate or lumount operations.

Problems can occur when the global zone administrator does not notify the non-global zone administrator of an upgrade with Live Upgrade.

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.

For example, if a non-global zone administrator adds a package while the global zone administrator is copying the file systems with the lucreate command, the new package is not copied with the file systems and the non-global zone administrator is unaware of the problem.

Creating a Boot Environment When a Non-Global Zone Is on a Separate File System

Creating a new boot environment from the currently running boot environment remains the same as in previous releases with one exception. You can specify a destination disk slice for a shared file system within a non-global zone. This exception occurs under the following conditions:

If on the current boot environment the zonecfg add fs command was used to create a separate file system for a non-global zone
If this separate file system resides on a shared file system, such as /zone/root/export

To prevent this separate file system from being shared in the new boot environment, the lucreate command enables specifying a destination slice for a separate file system for a non-global zone. The argument to the -m option has a new optional field, zonename. This new field places the non-global zone's separate file system on a separate slice in the new boot environment. For more information about setting up a non-global zone with a separate file system, see zonecfg(1M).

Note - By default, any file system other than the critical file systems (root (/), /usr, and /opt file systems) is shared between the current and new boot environments. Updating shared files in the active boot environment also updates data in the inactive boot environment. For example, the /export file system is a shared file system. If you use the -m option and the zonename option, the non-global zone's file system is copied to a separate slice and data is not shared. This option prevents non-global zone file systems that were created with the zonecfg add fs command from being shared between the boot environments.

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	Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 Installation Guide: Live Upgrade and Upgrade Planning Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 Information Library