But what is it good for?

Installing the Recommended Patch Cluster With Zones Parallel Patching

As promised on Friday, I've taken the plunge and tested applying the latest patch cluster to a fresh Solaris 10u5 installation running 10 zones using the new zones parallel patching feature.

To speed things up and to try and prevent any problems I performed the following steps:

  1. Jumpstarted the OS (SUNWCuser cluster)
  2. Applied patches 125555-04 and 119254-66 (gives us the parallel functionality)
  3. Created a basic sparse-root zone without any networking
  4. Cloned the zone 9 more times
  5. Create an alternate BE using live upgrade so I had two identical boot environments

Once I had the machine setup, I booted into single user mode (so all zones will be in the "installed" state) and set off the first cluster installation using the default options (ie no parallel application).

I then rebooted into single user mode on the alternate boot environment, set num_proc to 10 and applied the patch cluster again.

How's this for a significant difference in time:

num_proc=1

# uname -a
SunOS v4v-t5240b-gmp03 5.10 Generic_127127-11 sun4v sparc SUNW,T5240
#
# time ./install_cluster
[...]
./install_cluster 8319.85s user 6834.24s system 61% cpu 6:53:19.48 total
#
# init 6
[...]
# uname -a
SunOS v4v-t5240b-gmp03 5.10 Generic_141414-01 sun4v sparc SUNW,T5240
#

num_proc=10

# uname -a
SunOS v4v-t5240b-gmp03 5.10 Generic_127127-11 sun4v sparc SUNW,T5240
#
./install_cluster 13768.20s user 8973.91s system 216% cpu 2:55:22.16 total
#
# init 6
[...]
# uname -a
SunOS v4v-t5240b-gmp03 5.10 Generic_141414-01 sun4v sparc SUNW,T5240
#

This parallel patching is brilliant, pity we had to wait so long for it.

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