Solaris Live Upgrade support

Use the Solaris Live Upgrade tool to manage system downtime and risk when installing patches on alternate boot environments on Solaris 9 and 10 computers.

Introduction

An alternate boot environment of a Solaris computer is typically created by copying the entire root file system. With Solaris Live Upgrade, patches are applied in the duplicate boot environment, which is in an inactive state, while the original boot environment is running. After patching is done, you can restart your computer to use the alternate boot environment. For more information about Solaris Live Upgrade, see the Solaris Live Upgrade 2.0 Guide from the Oracle documentation: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/indexes/documentation/index.html.
Figure 1. Solaris Live Upgrade overview

Solaris Live Upgrade overview

Solaris Live Upgrade supports patch management for Security Patches, Recommended Patches, and Critical Patch Updates. You can find the related Fixlets in the Patches for Solaris Live Upgrade site.

Roadmap

To use Solaris Live Upgrade, complete the following steps:
  1. Ensure that the download plug-in is enabled.
  2. Run the Enable Solaris Live Upgrade task. See the steps in Running the enable Solaris Live Upgrade task.
  3. Ensure that the inactive boot environment that you want to patch has an BigFix client installed. For more information, see Installing the BigFix client.
  4. The process for patching boot environments depends on the system environment:
  5. Activate the newly-patched boot environment. For more information, see Activating inactive boot environments.
    Note: You must activate the boot environment that you choose immediately before rebooting the computer.
  6. Reboot to the alternate boot environment. For more information, see Rebooting to an alternate boot environment.