Solaris – Patching with Live
Upgrade, ZFS makes it so much easier
Solaris Live Upgrade is a superb tool that lets your operating system
create an alternate boot environment. Live Upgrade is a simple way to update or
patchs systems and minimizes downtime and mitigate risks often associated with
patching efforts. An admin can patch the system quickly without any
system interruption and this is done by patching the alternate boot environment
which the system will boot from on the next reboot after having been activated.
Live Upgrade creates a copy of the active boot environment, and that copy is
given a name. That copy becomes the alternate BE or boot environment.
Because there are multiple BE’s or boot environments, the true beauty of Live
Upgrade shows through. If problems occur with the newly created or patches
BE, the original BE could be used as the backup plant boot image. So revertng back
to a previous BE is the backout plan for almost all Live Upgrade installations.
Historically with UFS for even (I dread those days) with SVM, lucreate command
was much more complicated as you had software raid. ZFS with snapshots and
pools makes it so easy, it’s astounding. At the OBP or boot prom level,
it’s mostly the same. At the ok promg, a boot -L will list the BE’s assuming
the correct boot disk is mapped properly.
Live
Upgrade and patching
Patching a Solaris 10 ZFS based
system is done the same way you would path any basic Solaris system. You should
be able to patch the Solaris 10 ZFS based system with Live upgrade
successfully, and with no outages. The patches are downloaded and unziped in a
temporary location. Preferrably not on /tmp 
Assumptions
are that you have a valid and working rpool with zfs volumes. Lets look at our
existing BE’s and the active boot environment is Nov2012.
Assumptions
are that you have a valid and working rpool with zfs volumes. Lets look at our
existing BE’s and the active boot environment is Nov2012.
#
lustatus
Boot
Environment
Is Active Active
Can Copy
Name
Complete Now On Reboot Delete Status
————————–
——– —— ——— —— ———-
Nov2012
yes yes
yes no -
Oct2012
yes no
no yes -
I
need a new BE for next month, December. I normally have 2 BE’s and reotate and lurename
them. But for this blog article, I will crate a new one.
#
lucreate -n Dec2012
Analyzing
system configuration.
Updating
boot environment description database on all BEs.
Updating
system configuration files.
Creating
configuration for boot environment <Dec2012>.
Source
boot environment is <Nov2012>.
Creating
file systems on boot environment <Dec2012>.
Populating
file systems on boot environment <Dec2012>.
Analyzing
zones.
Duplicating
ZFS datasets from PBE to ABE.
Creating
snapshot for <rpool/ROOT/s10s_u10wos_17b> on
<rpool/ROOT/s10s_u10wos_17b@Dec2012>.
Creating
clone for <rpool/ROOT/s10s_u10wos_17b@Dec2012> on
<rpool/ROOT/Dec2012>.
Mounting
ABE <Dec2012>.
Generating
file list.
Finalizing
ABE.
Fixing
zonepaths in ABE.
Unmounting
ABE <Dec2012>.
Fixing
properties on ZFS datasets in ABE.
Reverting
state of zones in PBE <Nov2012>.
Making
boot environment <Dec2012> bootable.
Population
of boot environment <Dec2012> successful.
Creation
of boot environment <Dec2012> successful.
The lucreate in
conjunction with ZFS created the rpool/ROOT/s10s_u10wos_17b@Dec2012 snapshot
which was then cloned to rpool/ROOT/Dec2012. The rpool/ROOT/Dec2012 clone
is what you will see at the OBP when you do a boot -L . Lets look at
our BE’s status
#
lutatus
Boot
Environment
Is Active Active
Can Copy
Name
Complete Now On Reboot Delete Status
————————–
——– —— ——— —— ———-
Nov2012
yes yes
yes no -
Oct2012
yes no
no yes -
Dec2012
yes no
no yes -
Lets patch the new Dec2012 BE.
Assumption here is that we have downloaded the latest recommended patch cluster
from Sun or Oracle site. (depends who you have alliegience with). Lets
patch the BE while the system is running, and doing whatever the system is
supposed to do. Lets say it’s a DNS/NTP/Jumpstart server? Don’t know. Could be
anything. I’ve downloaded the patch cluster, unziped it in /var/tmp
#
uname -a
SunOS
tweetybird 5.10 Generic_147440-12 sun4v sparc sun4v
#
cd /var/tmp
#
luupgrade -n Dec2012 -s /var/tmp/10_Recommended/patches -t `cat patch_order`
Validating
the contents of the media </var/tmp/10_Recommended/patches>.
The
media contains 364 software patches that can be added.
Mounting
the BE <Dec2012>.
Adding
patches to the BE <Dec2012>.
Validating
patches …
Loading
patches install installed on the system…
Done!
Loading
patches requested to install.
…
Unmounting
the BE <Dec2012>
The patch add to the BE
<Dec2012> completed.
#
lustatus
Boot
Environment
Is Active Active
Can Copy
Name
Complete Now On Reboot Delete Status
————————–
——– —— ——— —— ———-
Nov2012
yes yes
yes no -
Oct2012
yes no
no yes -
Dec2012
yes no
no yes -
#
luactivate Dec2012
#
lutatus
Boot
Environment
Is Active Active
Can Copy
Name
Complete Now On Reboot Delete Status
————————–
——– —— ——— —— ———-
Nov2012
yes no
yes no -
Oct2012
yes no
no yes -
Dec2012
yes yes
no yes -
Lets reboot and makes sure the
prober BE comes up. Use must use either init or shutdown, do not use halt or
fastboot.
# init 6
After the server reboots, the
Dec2012 should automatically be booted with the newly implemented patch bundle.
So the Dec2012 is the new active BE. Lets check the kernel patch level:
# uname -a
SunOS tweetybird 5.10
Generic_147440-26 sun4v sparc sun4v
Looks good. With ZFS, Live Upgrade
it’s so simple now. Heck, Live Upgrade workds wonders when you have a UFS based
root volume and you dearly want to migrate over to a ZFS root volume. You will
need the ZFS capable kernel to start. Create a pool called rpool using
slices not the whole disk, then lucreate it to the rpool, activate it and then
reboot and you are booting off of a new ZFS based Solaris system. There are a
few tricks about creating the proper type of rpool. Maybe another blog
entry on this. But Live Upgrade is a great tool for migrating UFS systems to
ZFS. Again, with a slick backout option.
Disaster
– Plan B. You need an easy backout plan
Thanksfully having multiple BE’s you
can choose to backout simply by choosing one of the previously installed
BE’s. If the system boots up without trouble but applications are failing,
simply luactivate the original BE and reboot. If the system fails to boot (yikes,
this is rare), the from the boot prom, list the BE’s and choose the BE to boot
from.
ok
boot -L
.
.
.
Boot
device: /pci@1f,0/pci@1/scsi@8/disk@0,0 File and args: -L
zfs-file-system
Loading:
/platformsun4v/bootlst
1.Nov2012
2 Octv2012
3 Dec2012
Select
environment to boot: [ 1 - 3 ]: 1
to
boot the selected entry, invoke:
boot
[<root-device] -Z rpool/ROOT/Nov2012
and off you go. In special
cases, when you have to backout and boot from the original BE and it fails, you
will need to boot in fail safe mode and mount the current BE root slice
and import the rootpool. Instructions are as follows:
ok boot –f Failsafe
Now mount the current BE root slice
to /mnt.
#
zpool import rootpool
#
zfs inherit -r mountpoint rootpool/ROOT/Dec2012
#
zfs set mountpoint=/mnt rootpool/ROOT/Dec2012
#
zfs mount rootpool/ROOT/Dec2012
Here we are activating the
previously (known good) BE
# /mnt/sbin/luactivate
If this works, now reboot with
init 6.
# init 6
Please Note Live Upgrade and LDom’s
Require an Extra Step A quick note about Live Upgrade, ZFS and LDom’s.
Preserving the Logical Domains Constraints database file when using the
Oracle Solaris 10 Live Upgrade feature requires some hand holding. This is a
special situation. If you are using Live Upgrade on a Control Domain, you need
to enter the following line to the bottom of the /etc/lu/synclist file. As
in append this line.
# echo
“/var/opt/SUNWldm/ldom-db.xml OVERWRITE” >>
/etc/lu/synclist
This line is important, as it forces
the database to be copied automatically from the active boot environment to
the new boot environment when you switch boot environments. Otherwise, as
you may well guess, you lose your LDom configuration.
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