SUMMARY: A1000 Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 8 Upgrade Question

Thanks to:

  Graham Wood
  Deborah Cooker
  Darren Dunham
  David Foster
  Simon Burr
  Geof Lane
  Mark Hargrave
  Matthew Stier
  William Enestvedt


There were five votes for scenario B -- install Solaris 8 and RM 6.22.1,
and four for scenario A -- upgrade RM first.  Two of the latter votes,
however, were from people who had done an upgrade install of Solaris,
not a clean install, which is what I'd be doing.

The B voters thought there shouldn't be much problem, or had gone through
the process and had had no problems -- one said it was "easy peasy".
Also, RM is needed only to manage the array, not for data access, so even
if RM is broken, you can get your data.

There were a few caveats that don't apply to us, but merit mention.
If you're upgrading with an A3000, and you have a 2 MB DacStore, you
need to rebuild your LUNs when going to RM 6.22.x.  (This is mentioned
in the upgrade doc.)

If you upgrade to 6.22.x on Solaris 2.6, pay careful attention
to Sun Doc 22888: if your Solaris isn't patched, you may not be
able to boot the system after upgrading RM.

It was also suggested that I might want to either install Solaris
onto a new disk, keeping the old one, or do a ufsdump of the boot
disk, just in case something goes wrong.

I think I'm going to go with method B.  If anything goes heinously
wrong, I'll post here.

Thanks!

Original Question:


On Mon, 21 Apr 2003, David Eisner wrote:

> We have two A1000's attached to an Ultra 30 running Solaris 2.6, with
> RAID Manager 6.1.1.
>
> I need to "upgrade" the box to Solaris 8, while (hopefully) preserving
> the data -- I'd prefer not to have to restore 200 GB of data from tape.
> I put "upgrade" in quotes because it will really be a clean install after
> the disk is repartitioned.  None of the OS is on either array, and there's
> a second internal disk where I can save data I'll need after I upgrade
> the OS.
>
> According to Infodoc 43483, I need to upgrade to at least RM 6.22 (will
> probably go with RM 6.22.1) for use with Solaris 8.
>
> Since this is hardware RAID, it seems like I shouldn't have much problem.
> But the RAID Manager upgrade guide says things like this:
>
>     Note Follow the procedures in this document exactly.
>
>     It is possible, even likely, that you will encounter instructions within
>     this procedure that can be done better, faster, or even omitted
>     altogether. Resist the temptation to improve upon the procedures in this
>     document; if you alter the procedure, you risk an escalation due to an
>     upgrade gone wrong.
>
> so I'm a little worried.  Further complicating matters is the fact that the
> Solaris 2.6 currently installed isn't quite up to date, and patching it
> may be difficult or impossible (for reasons I won't go into).
>
> Would it be better to A) upgrade to RM 6.22.1 first, then install Solaris 8
> and re-install RM 6.22.1; or B) just install Solaris 8 and RM 6.22.1.
>
> Obviously scenario A) only makes sense if the RM upgrade changes the state
> of the A1000's, or if there's RAID Manager book-keeping info I'll need to
> squirrel away on the second disk when I go from Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 8.
>
> Any advice is greatly appreciated.
>
> -David
>

------------------------+--------------------------+
David Eisner            | E-mail: cradle@umd.edu   |
CALCE EPSC              | Phone:  301-405-5341     |
University of Maryland  | Fax:    301-314-9269     |
------------------------+--------------------------+
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