Solaris

Guys,

I am more into IBM/HP unix stuff and my org wants me to do some kungfu on SUN , I have fair understanding of solaris only and I need ur help .
I have to migrate all of my existing solaris boxes to their latest levels ( soalris 10) , having this daunting task I need your suggestions on what could be the best way to accomplish, I have systems with the following configurations Solaris 6 , Solaris 8 and Solaris 9. We dont have vendor support as of now. My queries :

- Can we upgrade Solaris6/8 to Solaris 10
- I am aware of the fact that Solaris 9 can be migrated to Solaris 10 using live upgrade but can we do that for the rest or do we have any alternate options
- Is there any other way apart from live upgrade to do the migrration

- Is migration to Solaris 11 is a good option , if thats the case how can we do it?

If you don't have support I wouldn't go for solaris 11 now... Solaris 10 is a very mature product and latest version run pretty smooth.

To migrate 9 to 10 use Live Upgrade, I've done it many times and works perfectly... you might face some problems depending the installation and the customization level but in general works very well. You can follow this procedure

Upgrading from Solaris 9 with a Root SVM Mirror to Solaris 10 with a Root ZFS Mirror with less than 10 Minutes of Downtime

For Solaris 8 have you consider running them on solaris 10 branded zones?

If the application works fine then it might not worth to do such a move, you either reinstall and reconfigure to solaris 10 or run the whole OS on a zone. Of course that's my personal opinion, you could still go through the upgrade path.

For your needs I think Live Upgrade is the best path, if you run into problems you can always boot from the original boot environment. You can either use the DVD and select the upgrade option.

Should I mention backup is always a good idea no matter what you use...

Any question let us know... cheers Juan

Juan the reply and the links are useful to me , let me plan on this. I have no idea on zones and the hardware required and forecasting the performance if we implement , they must be some sort of VMs will find out more on web.

Yeah app is running pretty much on Solaris 8, but in the coming years we felt to keep all the servers at latest levels.

Thanks .

Zones are the analog to OpenVZ project on linux, and branded zones are full virtualization... but still only a few operating systems are supported like previous solaris versions and linux.
Good luck

Juan

Thanks for your information Juan, I found some useful docs in oracle website for live upgrade.

Thanks,
niv