vPars Upgrade

[Naveej.K.A]

Hi All,

I am planning an upgrade of the vPars from A.05.05 to A.05.09.  The RX8640 frame is partitioned into one nPar and has 6 virtual Partitions.  All of them are running HPUX 11iv3.  From the release notes, I understand the pre-requisites; viz. Feature11i, server firmware, NIC&FC firmware, among the other things.  But, What I couldn't find in the documentations (ordering & Licensing guide, release notes & Admnistration guide) was clarity on how to do the upgrade minor release of the vPars.  We are on VSE OE.  

I remember reading some years back that we need to boot the vpars in npar mode and upgrade the vPars.  But the following questions lingers on in my mind:

1) Which vPar should be upgraded first/last?  Should the first created vPar be the last to update? Or is it installed in vPar mode itself (like mentioned in pg 75 of the vPar Admin Guide - March 2012) ?

2) I can get the bundle for T1335DC from the latest OS DVD.  Is there a better way/place?

3) How do I install it

                  - swinstall? If so, what options do I chose?

                  - update-ux? As mentioned in "Updating from vPars A.04.xx to A.05.xx" of the "vPar Admin guide"?

                  - some other way?

4) Any documents available or any other critical actions to consider during this minor release upgrade?

5) Do I have to worry about any thing on licensing front?

Regards,
Naveej

[Naveej.K.A · Accepted solution]

All,

Managed to find answers to all the questions and we successfully upgraded the vPars from A.05.03 to A.05.09.

1) Which vPar should be upgraded first/last? Should the first created vPar be the last to update? Or is it installed in vPar mode itself (like mentioned in pg 75 of the vPar Admin Guide - March 2012) ?
The last vPar to be upgraded should be the one that holds the boot monitor path. You can check / verify this using the vparstatus -m command. You can use update-ux to upgrade OE & vPars together or if you already meet the requisites with respect to OE, you could simply upgrade vPars using swinstall, while running in the vPar mode itself.

2) I can get the bundle for T1335DC from the latest OS DVD. Is there a better way/place?
Yes, I ordered the new DVD and T1335DC was there. I created a depot on the Ignite server out of it and removed the software that I didn't want to upgrade (like ServiceGuard).

3) How do I install it
- swinstall? If so, what options do I chose?
- update-ux? As mentioned in "Updating from vPars A.04.xx to A.05.xx" of the "vPar Admin guide"?
- some other way?
My servers were running vPars A.05.03 and my OE was B.11.0803. vPars A.05.09 neeed atleast an OE of B.11.1203. So, I had to update my OE. Now, for some reasons I didn't want to update both the OE and vPars at the same time. So I got two outages one to update OE (oe-update, card firmware & patches) and the other outage to upgrade vPars.

4) Any documents available or any other critical actions to consider during this minor release upgrade?
Ignite backups and copy of your /stand/vpmon & /stand/vpdb. Make sure you copy it to a different server.

5) Do I have to worry about any thing on licensing front?
No licensing work to worry about.

[Torsten.]

I would do the following:

- Update the first vPar

- reboot the nPar

- update all other vPars

or

- update all vPars

- reboot the nPar

The manual has detailed instructions!

Mybe it is a good idea to update the whole OS using update-ux to make new features available.

So basically the same steps you did.