[pca] [OT] OpenSolaris / IPS support & patching

[Craig Bell]

Dave, I find a major improvement with Zones Parallel Patching:
http://blogs.sun.com/patch/date/20090617

Now our only limit is available I/O on UFS filesystems.  The maintenance
window is much more tolerable on modest sun4v container systems.  Since
ZPP serves our needs, I haven't seriously looked at update-on-attach as
of yet.

We also use "pca --noreboot" to apply non-reboot patches ahead of time,
this further minimizes the window needed for single-user patching.  pca
has to interpret the READMEs, but this has worked perfectly for us so
far.

Also, I have a few Solaris 10 systems with ZFS root -- some for over a
year now.  With U8 and recent patches, Live Upgrade with zones and
ZFS-based BE's is very useful, and IMHO relatively un-dramatic compared
to the old days of LU.

For LU, I usually patch with "lumount" and "pca -R", rather than feeding
luupgrade - works great.  If you can somehow get to UFS or ZFS root,
then you can reduce your maintenance time like this, even if you don't
go with LU.

As for OpenSolaris, I am cautiously optimistic.  It should be
straightforward to maintain local package repositories, which is
critical -- we must be able to complete a patch run entirely from our
local cache, without the internet.

IPS analysis performance has improved, but I think there is still much
to be done before it's ready for production.  Will it be better than
SysV packages?  I believe so -- we have merely grown comfortable with
the SysV devils that we know.  =-)

We do not use OpenSolaris on any server environments yet, just
workstations and test VM guests.  I should say that I don't really love
the GUI package and update tools, but this is less important for my
needs.

Good luck... I hope that you will stick with Solaris.  It may be easier
to patch Linux (I'm a user since 1992), but then it seems that one ends
up patching more frequently.  Sun's coherent integration and testing add
a lot of value.

-cheers, CSB

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