How to upgrade Solaris8 to Solaris9

[gavs2005]

We have to upgrade Solaris 8 servers to Solaris 9. List what are all the steps and risk involved and how to proceed and all.

Please guide me as soon as possible.

Regards
Aditya

 

[bfitzmai]

Gavs,
Have always ran an initial installation "Full Distribution w/OEM" instead of upgrading an OS. There is a reason for this but, I can't remember what one of my certification instructors said exactly. If you have a separate partition for /usr, the /usr directory is almost 2 time larger in Solaris 9 than in Solaris 8. So repartitioning your may be necessary.

 

[bfitzmai]

Sorry... Got interrupted... Should read:

So repartitioning your hard drive may be necessary.

 

[marrow]

I have just upgraded 8 to 9, if not enough space on root, system will offer to rearrange, this i don't like, it'll move partitions around and sizes may not be to your liking. If space OK, will use what's there and all should be OK. Make sure you get rid of old files, I left a large Patch file on root system and it caused me a headache with rearranging the Partitions.
Also you have to break mirrors if you have them, big risk is reattaching, on newer V200's, disks are a bit volatile and prone to errors. But you'd get this with an install as well. Either mthod has adavatages, upgrade saves you a load of work and overall quicker, Install is cleaner - all rubbish is removed. Depends how much time you have, if you upgrade and don't like it, Install!