Solaris

I had the same problem. I switched to using liveupgrade to patch the servers. Of course this only works if the system has a mirrored root environment. If you can get liveupgrade setup and working, you can patch the inactive boot environment. Then the outage will only be as long as it takes to boot the server.

You can also look into detaching the zones before you install the patches, and then doing a zoneadm attach -u to update the zones after the patches are installed in the global.

Yes Live upgrade is definitely the best practice here. Note that with your root file system on ZFS (Solaris 10 10/08 or later update), you no more need a mirrored boot environment. A ZFS clone will be used instead.

Provide the SR number.

Hi, I must apologize for the degree of hysteria in my first post. I was informed the wrong time, that other system with 3 zones took, it was ~9.5 hours; system I was writing about took ~12 hours with 4 zones, so it all make sense.

I`m very eager to try to upgrade system from this June EIS -> October EIS with parallel patching feature.

If it works as it supposed - it really is a timesaver.

Thanks a lot for your replies.

Nik