[pca] Cluster, zones, noreboot.

[David Stark]

On 13/07/2010 12:31, Filip Francis wrote:
> Hi there,

Hi!

> I have done already quit a few upgrades of sun clusters.
> Can you give me some more details on what version off cluster + version
> off os.

Sure. It's Sun Cluster 3.2 on Solaris 10 5/08. Mainly 2 node clusters, 
but there's a 3 node and a 6 node as well. Mainly T5220 machines hooked 
up to EMC Symmetrix storage. The hosts' / slices are all UFS, all the 
zones and data filesystems are ZFS.

> Regards
> Filip

Cheers!
Dave

> On 07/13/10 11:52, David Stark wrote:
>> Hi List.
>>
>> A bit off-topic, but PCA's involved, so I'm going to push my luck.
>>
>> We've got a number of Sun Cluster installs using (lots of) failover
>> zones and with no LiveUpgrade alt. boot space set up, which we need to
>> patch. If we were to patch the clusters node-by-node (including the
>> kernel patches that don't like zones being booted when they're
>> applied), the zones would fail over between the nodes and never get
>> patched themselves, and since kernel (and some other?) patches can't
>> be applied from inside zones we would end up in a situation where the
>> zones' patch databases are out of sync with the Global zone. I know
>> from very bitter experience that this is a Bad Thing, so to avoid that
>> we're currently bringing the clusters down to patch them. This
>> obviously isn't optimal - people expecting 100% uptime from the
>> clusters are naturally a bit annoyed at having their applications down
>> for several hours while we unleash the mighty PCA.
>>
>> So, to minimise downtime I'd like to apply the noreboot patches, say,
>> the night before, and have a more minimal patch run with the clusters
>> down. This brings me to the question:
>>
>> Has anyone ever had any problems with noreboot patches applied to live
>> systems? Any weirdness at all? I've patched plenty of test machines in
>> multi-user mode, but never busy production boxes - these are fairly
>> large Oracle and SAP environments for the most part.
>>
>> Anyone with experience patching Sun Cluster care to share any top tips?
>>
>> Cheers!
>>
>> Dave
>>
>>
>>
>