If you are upgrading from Solaris 10 3/05 to Solaris Express you need to install the Solaris Express release of Live Upgrade. This isn’t hard. Just pkgrm SUNWlur SUNWluu and SUNWluzone and add the same packages from the Solaris Express cds. bam, done.

Also when doing a cd free upgrade, if upgrading on sparc, you need to split the first cd into two separate mount iso’s and only luupgrade the first mount (s0). Check here. Otherwise when doing an luupgrade it will say your source is not an upgrade image. However, you do not have to split the first cd with x86 release.

Liveupgrade is one of the easiest procedures once you understand it. For it to work without much complication, you have to setup your slices to support liveupgrade from the beginning (the first time you install Solaris). They must be setup so that you have empty slice(s) for the boot environment (BE) to be installed. This is the slice that the new Solaris you are upgrading to will be installed on, so be sure to make enough room. Once it is installed on the new slice, you boot the new slice instead of your old one.

So the first part in accomplishing liveupgrade is getting your slices setup correctly. Here I used Solaris Express and I only have one disk (20gig) so I setup my slices this way:

c0d0s0, /, 9000MB
c0d0s1, swap, 2000MB
c0d0s2, backup, 20000MB (automatically created)
c0d0s3, /altroot, 9000MB (this is where BE will be)


If you have 2 separate disks, you could use one disk for your initial Solaris, and the other disk for your liveupgrade. But since I only have one disk here, I just use slice3 as my liveupgrade. If I were to separate my slices (/, /opt, /usr, /var) instead of just using one single root (/) slice, I would need just as many of those slices free for the liveupgrade.

After I setup my slices, installed, and booted, it mounts /altroot to slice3, so I edited it out of /etc/vfstab so its not mounted at boot anymore.

The next part in liveupgrade is creating the boot environment. This is done by one simple command:

# lucreate -c "solenv1" -m /:/dev/dsk/c0d0s3:ufs -n "solenv2"

The -c assigns the specified name to the current boot environment.
The -m specifys the location of root slice (/) going to be copied to /dev/dsk/c0d0s3 (/altroot).
The -n specifys the name of the liveupgrade boot environment.
* If something screws up you can use ludelete BE_name to delete the boot environment and try again.
* You can use lufslist -n solenv2 to view the boot environment just created.

Ok so now that we have our slices setup and boot environment created, all we need to do is the upgrade and then activate our new boot environment. The upgrade process can be done many ways (local,net,cdrom,flash). All four of these are done the same way except each one you specify a different path to the image through the -s flag. For example:

Local file:

# luupgrade -u -n solenv2 -s /Solaris_10/path/to/os_image

Net:

# luupgrade -u -n solenv2 -s /net/Solaris_10/path/to/os_image

Cdrom:

# luupgrade -u -n solenv2 -s /cdrom/Solaris_10/path/to/os_image

Flash:

# luupgrade -u -n solenv2 -s /path/to/flash.flar

The -u specifys to upgrade OS image on a boot environment.
The -n specifys what boot environment to upgrade.
The -s specifys the source to the OS image/flash image.

I did a local file install which kept me from having to burn any cds and was simple. I downloaded the latest Solaris Express (build 24) ISO’s and then unzip’d them, used lofiadm to put the ISO’s to a device, then mounted them:

# unzip *.iso
# lofiadm -a /sol-nv-b24-x86-v1.iso
/dev/lofi/1
# mkdir /cd1 /cd2 /cd3 /cd4
# mount -F hsfs /dev/lofi/1 /cd1

Repeat the necessary steps for each ISO file.

Now that we have chosen where we are upgrading from, we are ready to do the upgrade.
On the first cd you use the -u option and on the rest you use -i to tell it additional cds, like so:

# luupgrade -u -n solenv2 -s /cd1
# luupgrade -i -n solenv2 -s /cd2
# luupgrade -i -n solenv2 -s /cd3
# luupgrade -i -n solenv2 -s /cd4

(follow prompts, use defaults)

All we need to do now is activate the solenv2 boot environment:

# luactivate solenv2

Reboot

# init 6

The new boot environment should come up after reboot.
Sources and other good Live Upgrade information:

Sun BigAdmin Live Upgrade
docs.sun.com: Live Upgrade

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