Solaris Live Upgrade 2

[krishsays]

Hi All,

We have a system running Solaris 2.6 with Veritas volume manager 3.0.4. We need to upgrade it to Solaris 8 and VVM 3.0.4 is supported in Solaris 8. I am planning to use the Live upgrade utility from Sun to do this upgrade. As per the documents it says that unencapsulate the boot disk before using the live upgrade. Apart from root disk we have a storage array with lot of disks which are under veritas control. I have few questions about this live upgrade :
1. Do I need to remove all my disk from Veritas control.
2. Do I need to remove the Veritas volume manager completely and then reinstall it again on Solaris 2.8 disk. If this is the case then what will happen to my other disk which are under veritas control
3. Do I need to reinstall softwares ( Like Autosys and Sybase) which are installed in the Solaris 2.6 on this new solaris 2.8 disk as well.

thanks
Kris
.

 

[cndcadams]

krishsays;

I have the same questions as you do. I was asked to do a live upgrade from solaris 7 to 9, but have not been given the background of what third party software the customer is running.

note from docs I have read;

Caution - When upgrading and adding and removing packages or patches, Solaris Live Upgrade requires packages or patches that comply with the SVR4 Advanced Packaging Guidelines. While Sun packages conform to these guidelines, Sun cannot guarantee the conformance of packages from third-party vendors. If a package violates these guidelines, the package can cause the package-addition software during an upgrade to fail or alter the active boot environment.

For more information on adding and removing packages with Solaris Live Upgrade, see the man page, luupgrade(1M). For more information on packaging requirements, see Appendix G, Additional SVR4 Packaging Requirements (Reference).



He is a couple links if you have not already found it, although the links are for solaris 9 it may be helpful;

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/submitted/live_upgrade_veritas.html

http://docsun.cites.uiuc.edu/sun_docs/C/solaris_9/SUNWinab/SPARCINSTALL/toc.html

Anyways I am setting up a test bed and hope to figure out what will happen with encapsulated boot drives with veritas.

When I have learned more I will post. Also if you come up with anything I would appreciate it if you could post it.

Thanks

CA

 

[cndcadams]

krishsays;

I am still trying to get things working on this. Found another document that I thought may be helpful to you;

Sun infodoc 43596. Was just updated feb 28 2006. just found this today.

I am not encouraged by what I have so far experienced with this, allthough it may just be me doing something wrong since I am not a Veritas expert.

My test box is solaris 8 veritas 3.5, upgradeing the OS to solaris 9 and keeping Veritas 3.5 since I do not have a newer edition. I am not even encapsulateing the root drive at this point. I have just set up a raid 5 volume with some cd images on it.

I have tried following multiple document instructions but seem to get different issues with each.

The latest issue is Ux: vxfs mount ERROR /chris1 not a dir /dev/vx/dsk/rootdg/chris not a directory on my volume on boot up. Strange thing is vxdisk list show everything online and the vxprint show volume enabled but it does not mount. (this is where my lack of Veritas comes into play).

Anyways make sure you test your procedure a couple times.

If you have found anything new let me know.

Thanks

CA

 

[cndcadams]

krishsays;

Using parts of the below link I was able to get the first part of my testing to complete.

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/submitted/live_upgrade_veritas.html

again the configuration I was working with was;

solaris 8 veritas 3.5, upgradeing the OS to solaris 9 and keeping Veritas 3.5 since I do not have a newer edition. no root drive encapsulateing at this point. I have just set up a raid 5 volume with some cd images on it.

steps I took

1) pkginfo -l SUNWlur SUNWluu

2) pkgrm SUNWlur SUNWluu

3)install live update for the OS I was installing.. used solaris 9 disk 2

4) installed patches for live update found on doc 72099

5) formatted and partitioned the new drive the way I wanted it. (make sure when paartitioning the drive you set the flags to WB, they also must be WB on current BE or lucreate will fail)

6)ran lucreate for the partitions I wanted copied. this is what I ran;

#lucreate -c sol8 -m /:/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0:ufs -m \
-:/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s1:swap -m /usr:/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s3:ufs \
-m /var:/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s4:ufs \
-m /opt:/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s5:ufs \
-m /export/home:/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s6:ufs -n sol9

7)#lumount sol9

8)# cd /.alt.sol9/etc
# cp -p vfstab vfstab.vxfs
# sed '/vx\/dsk/s/^/#/g' vfstab.vxfs > vfstab
# cp system system.vxfs
# sed '/forceload:.*drv\/vx/s/^/*/' system.vxfs > system

9)# showrev -p | egrep “112392|113203|113595|113596|113698”

10)#patchrm -R /.alt.sol9 112392-01 (I only had this patch installed)

11)Once all the patches are removed, remove VERITAS packages from the ABE(alternate boot environment.

Before you use the command pkgrm, make sure that you don't have these files:

/ABEmountpoint/var/vx/isis/vxisis.lock
If you have these files, remove them.

#rm /var/vx/isis/vxisis.lock /.alt.sol9/var/vx/isis/vxisis.lock

12)# pkginfo -l -R /.alt.sol9 | grep VRTS
VRTSvmpro VRTSfspro VRTSfsdoc VRTSvmdoc VRTSvmman VRTSvxfs VRTSobgui VRTSvxvm VRTSob VRTSvlic
Remove the packages depending on their interdependencies.



13)#pkgrm -R /.alt.sol9 packagename (I removed the packages in the order they are above, Be careful to remove the packages in reverse order of how they are installed. Reason for this is on one of my test runs I removed VRTSvxvm before VRTSvmpro and when I tried to remove VRTSvmpro some of the backout scripts had been removed so pkgrm failed causeing my test to ulimately fail)

I did not get this error but you may;

More information is available on VERITAS incident #113279. A description can be found on SunSolve for Patch 113201.

(113279) pkgrm -R should not unload (local) vxvm modules. This is fixed by patch 113201-05, which has dependency patches as well. The same problem is also noticed in VERITAS Version 3.1 and 3.1.1.

No patch exists for those versions. In order to keep the primary boot disk out of risk and to have a standard procedure for three versions of VXVM, we will use the following procedure.

In this scenario (when pkgrm -R on VRTSvxvm fails), we will partially mimic what pkgrm does, by using the rm command.

# touch /.alt.Solaris9/etc/vx/reconfig.d/state.d/install-db
# rm /.alt.Solaris9/kernel/drv/vx*
# rm /.alt.Solaris9/kernel/drv/sparcv9/vx*


14) I then ran the upgrage procedure with local cd's;
Insert cd 1 of 2 solaris 9
#luupgrade -u -n sol9 -s /cdrom/cdrom0/s0
Wait for completion
Insert cd 2 0f 2 solaris 9
#luupgrade -i -n sol9 -s /cdrom/cdrom0
Wait for completion

15)I had downloaded patches 113596-05 113595-06 113203-04 112392-08 to my solaris 8 environment.
ran
#lumount sol9 (to mount ABE)
#cp patches to /.alt.sol9
#luumount sol9 (to unmount ABE)

16)# luactivate sol9 (To activate the ABE)

17)#init 0 (you should see messages for the sol9 boot environment being activated.

18)boot -s (make sure that the correct boot environment boots up, a couple times my system did not boot the environment I wanted)

19)I mounted my cdrom and put in the cd 1 of Veritas 3.5

20) #cd /cdrom
#./installer and installed Volume manager (all packages) and filesystems. (I only had the licenses for these so you may need to install more packages)

Also when I installed the Volume Manager packages It will ask you if you want to restore the old configuration part way through adding the packages.

21)ran;
#patchadd . 113596-06
#patchadd . 113595-06
#patchadd . 113203-04
#patchadd . 112392-08

22) #reboot -- -s
when system came up single user I ran vxdisk list to confirm I had atleast rootdg

23) Restore the original vfstab and system files.

# cp /etc/vfstab /etc/vfstab.beforereboot
# cp /etc/system /etc/system.beforereboot
# cp /etc/vfstab.vxfs /etc/vfstab
# cp /etc/system.vxfs /etc/system

24)Remove install-db and reboot.

# rm -f /etc/vx/reconfig.d/state.d/install-db
# init 6 / shutdown -i 6 -y -g 0


My raid 5 volume mounted on reboot and all information was there so it was successful.

My next steps will be to build a system with encapsulated boot drive since there are more steps to do when boot drives are encapsulated.

will update later

Thanks

CA

 

[cndcadams]

krishsays;

I made a typo in my directions;

5) formatted and partitioned the new drive the way I wanted it. (make sure when paartitioning the drive you set the flags to WB, they also must be WB on current BE or lucreate will fail)

flags should be WM not WB..

sorry

CA

 

[krishsays]

CA ,

Great going. I think you are going good with this stuff. Well my testing did not go that well. I was trying to upgrade solaris from 6 to 8 and I was able to create the ABE and was able to boot from both boot environment but when I upgraded the ABE with Solaris 8 ,the command said that the upgrade was successfull , but when I tried to boot it from this upgraded ABE , the boot failed and finally I ended up booting from the Original boot environment. This happened in a test system where I did not had any volume manager and it was just a plain Solaris 6 Ultra-60 box with no application on it. I guess using Live upgrade with Solaris 6 is not that great idea. So I am planning to use the normal Solaris CD upgrade for my servers. But this testing taught me lot of stuff about this Live upgrade and keeping your experience in mind I will surely use this whenever I am upgrading Solaris 8 or higher verions. Anyway I got following information which you can use. If you have access to SunSolve then you can access this really good document :

http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-9-43596-1&searchclause=43596

or you can search the info doc 43596
that is really good resource. Let me know if you dont get that document and I can email it you.

Also as you said you had some issues with Veritas .there is really cool procedure to avoid all the hassles with veritas. Veritas have a scripts folder on thier VVM cd. It has some scripts namely upgrade_start and Upgrade_finish. You can run the upgrade_start scpript before running you Solaris upgrade and then you dont have do anything related with Veritas. That script does the unencapsulation stuff , backing up vfstab and system and changes. You just need to run the upgrade_start script and then reboot the system and check your system is back with normal disk partitions. Do the solaris upgrade and then run the Upgrade_finish script and it will restore everything back.

This is what Veritas document have to say about :
-------------------------------------------------------
2. Run the upgrade_start script to prepare the previous release of the Volume Manager for its removal:
# CD_path/scripts/upgrade_start
The upgrade_start script looks for volumes containing file systems. Ifcertain key file systems must be converted back to using partitions, thes cript will indicate that a reboot is necessary. If so, reboot to single-user mode before proceeding to the next step. If any volumes are in use, you
must either unmount those volumes or reboot to single-user mode.
3. Shut down and halt the machine (using a command such as
/etc/shutdown).
4. Upgrade the operating system to Solaris 2.6, 7, or 8.
Refer to the Solaris installation documentation for instructions on how to upgrade Solaris.
5. Reboot to single-user mode (using a command such as /etc/shutdown).
6. Complete the upgrade by entering:
# CD_path/scripts/upgrade_finish
Reboot to multi-user mode (using a command such as /etc/shutdown).
-----------------------------------------------------

I dont have any environment at the moment to test this stuff so I have'nt tested it. You can test this and let me know if this works fine.
Here are few examples where people have used it successfully:

http://www.sunmanagers.org/pipermail/sunmanagers/2001-September/006776.html

http://www.sunmanagers.org/pipermail/sunmanagers/2005-January/034306.html

I guess if this works then your upgrade will be a breaze.
Lets keep this post open and update our results here , it will be surely useful for others someday.
thanks
krish

 

[cndcadams]

krishsays;

Thanks for the info. I will test a few things out once I get done with another project I have been asked to check out.

Anyways a couple things.

When doing your install from 2.6 to solaris 8.

The live upgrade packages have to be from the OS you are upgradenig to. check out doc 80547 for the versions you should be using.

Also did you install the required patches for live update on solaris 6 doc 72099


Unfortunately the solaris 6 my company had is bad or I would load that and try an upgrade to Solaris 8. I think my personal copies of Solaris 6 are still in storage from when I moved.

Well thanks for the update, I will keep you posted with any new info.

Thanks

CA