Solairs - Upgrading and Patching LDOMs

Still investigating the patching. If you've been reading the previous patching blogs you'll know that the bare metal OS is sorted plus the Zones (which is just patch the bare metal and the Zone receives the patch as well) have been covered using ZFS and Live Upgrade (being still reasonably new to Solaris I've been impressed with).

What hasn't been covered is LDOMs of which we have very few and will soon be getting rid of the last one shortly.

So far I've patched the bare metal OS, or Host, which runs the LDOM application. The machine has been patched using the previous steps as statement in the older blogs - upgrade to update 10 and then applying the latest Recommended patches.

NOTE: The Host system is running on ZFS.

Patching the LDOM is the same as patching a physical server. Since I use Live Upgrade to upgrade and patch the OS I had to check whether Live Upgrade was installed.

# telnet localhost 5000

Log in to the Virtual Machine and then check if Live Upgrade packages are installed.

# pkginfo | grep "Live Upgrade"

If it is installed then you need to apply the Live Upgrade patches. Having spoken to Oracle Support about the "Best Practice" for patching LDOMs the support guy recommended the following patches for Live Upgrade:
119252-35, 119254-86, 119534-32, 120199-19, 121428-15, 121430-83, 124630-69, 137321-02, 144569-01, 146054-07, 146578-06, 147061-01

(I've only been using 119254-84, 121428-15, 121430-80, 141444-09, 146578-06 with my previous attempts which has worked fine as most of the patches aren't applied when ran).

After applying the patches:

# patchadd 119252-35 (repeat for each patch)

NOTE: Effectively from this point on it is just like patching a physical server (you could even argue that it is full stop - which I would agree with but this was the steps I took to get to the point I was comfortable patching the VM)

Then create a new Boot Environment (BE) for patching (or for upgrade purposes)

# lucreate -n u10guest

Patch or upgrade the newly created BE (in this case upgrade using a script as I wanted to have note of how long each process took - upgrade and patch). /dvd is the mount point for the Solaris 10 Update 10 ISO.

#!/usr/bin/ksh
echo "`date` : Start ---------------"
luupgrade -u -n u10guest -s /dvd >> /logs/u10log
echo "`date` : Finish -------------"

# nohup ./upgrade &

Once the upgrade has occurred you can activate and reboot into the new BE u10_guest

# luactivate -n u10guest

Make note of the out just in case you need to recover...... then reboot the server.

# init 6

Once the server has rebooted apply the Live Update patches (119252-35, 119254-86, 119534-32, 120199-19, 121428-15, 121430-83, 124630-69, 137321-02, 144569-01, 146054-07, 146578-06, 147061-01).