[pca] Cluster, zones, noreboot.

[Glenn Satchell]

When a zone migrates back to a patched system, doesn't it normally 
update itself as it starts up the first time?

Have a look at the zoneadm man page, in particular the attach and detach 
sub-commands. I don't know for sure, but Sun Cluster may be smart enough 
to do the right thing and use zoneadm attach -u to bring the zone up to 
date when it attaches to the patched system.

Perhaps a quick chat with your local Sun SE to help plan things might be 
time well spent?

regards,
-glenn

On 07/13/10 21:41, David Stark wrote:
> 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
>>>