Upgrading to Opensolaris 2009.06

Released few days ago, Opensolaris 2009.06 comes with a lot of new features (see Release notes and “What’s new“), like for example support for Sparc hardware (sun4u, sun4v), network virtualization with Crosbow, improvements in CIFS and ZFS time-slider snapshots (read this!),…

So last night I decided to upgrade my Opensolaris 2008.11 server to 2009.06. I have more than 7 years working in Unix administration, but I have to recognize that a full OS upgrade is always something a bit scary and risky. But honestly, upgrading Opensolaris is scarily easy — much like Debian or Ubuntu — and also safe!

• Easy upgrade:

The upgrade process can be run with two command:

$ pfexec pkg install SUNWipkg
$ pfexec pkg image-update -v

Or more easily by running the IPS Package Manager graphical interface.

• Safe upgrade

Yes, upgrading the full Opensolaris OS is safe, thanks to ZFS and Boot Environments. Whenever you upgrade a critical package or the full system: Opensolaris creates a new BE, that is a bootable ZFS clone (writable snapshot) of the actual running OS filesystem. The corresponding entry in GRUB is automatically added, of course!

The upgraded packages are actually installed on the recently created BE. Once finished the package installation, just reboot into the new BE and you get your new OS release runnung. Should something go wrong, just reboot into the previous BE.

BEs consum space based on the upgraded files only, so if you upgrade just a few packages, it won’t eat a lot of disk. Of course, upgrading the full OS is more space consuming:

NAME                        USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
rpool/ROOT                 7.24G  78.4G    18K  legacy
rpool/ROOT/opensolaris     8.31M  78.4G  2.60G  /
rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-1   7.60M  78.4G  3.19G  /
rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-2   35.3M  78.4G  4.21G  /
rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-3   7.19G  78.4G  4.59G  /

You can manage (mount, umount, activate, and destroy…) BEs with beadm(1M):

• Unfortunately upgrading Opensolaris is a bit slow! Yes IPS is great, but at the moment it is really slow — compared to Debian’s APT for example. In my case I left the upgrade process all night and when waking up it was upgraded ;-):

Et voila:

$ cat /etc/release
                         OpenSolaris 2009.06 snv_111b X86
           Copyright 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.
                        Use is subject to license terms.
                              Assembled 07 May 2009

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