upgrading a not in use copy of hp-ux 11 to hp-ux 11i

[BUPA IS]

We have an hp-ux V class server running hp-ux 11.0 and need to upgrade to hp-ux 11i. From past experience with upgrading hp-ux we estimate the upgrade could take 7 hours which is longer then our user community would like to have the box down for.

Has anyone done an operating system upgrade against a copy of the operating system that is not the booted copy of the operating system? For people familar with solaris we are trying to emulate the Solaris 'Live Upgrade' process.

The process that we are thinking of trying on our V class would go something like this....

1) get an ignite copy of the current boot disk

2) add some spare disks in the V class disk cabinet and put them in a new vg group, e.g. vg20

3) during the working day, whilst the v class is running restore the ignite copy of the current boot disk to the spare boot disk in vg20. resize any filesystems as appropriate

4) run swinstall against the spare boot disk specifying an operating system upgrade

5) manually copy over any files that have changed on the current boot disk to the new 'upgraded' boot disk since the operating system was copied using ignite

6) fix LVM on the 'upgraded' boot disk so that the disk is in vg00.

7) boot the v class on the 'upgraded' boot disk

Has anyone gone down this path before? Any comments welcome - regards James.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

I'd say it's interesting but too risky, because I'm not sure what is going to happen in 4). The installation filesets should all have the relocatable attribute (used for diskless systems), but I think You should definitely must chroot to the 'new' root directory for trying it, or otherwise the box goes to hell ;)

maybe consider this:
I'd split the upgrade process -
1) identify data in vg00
(lvm config, passwd, services, homedirs)
2)DOWNTIME: reboot, disconnect everything but only a new installation disk
(You can surely do a os install in well less than 2 hours, get a 15k drive on U160 controller)
3) restart old state
4) import new os vg00 as vg20
5) create scripts for merging configuration data, move over vg mapfiles, extend fstab, services etc.
6) check that the new ioconfig is ok and all needed drivers are in the 11.11 kernel (i.e. old 32bit tachyon adapters are unsupported :)
6)DOWNTIME (optional):
reboot to init 2, run scripts and copy everything over.
7)DOWNTIME
boot new os disk to LVM mainteance mode, import the vg's, vgchange, mountall, look if everything seems fine.
umount and deactivate.
Those things would also better be scripted.
8)init 2 - everything ok?
9) oracle relink if needed
10) init 3 - either You're done, or You need to record the errors and fall back.

All this would assume that You know Your applications will work - do You have data on this?
(We haven't seen any problems yet, but we did test it in advance, so murphy was out of the game)

[BUPA IS]

thanks for the reply Florian, I hadn't thought about the Tachyon adaptor drivers being 32bit and will check out if these need to be upgraded for 11i. On the steps you identify I don't see where the actual upgrade of hp-ux 11 to 11i happens.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

Hi,

No step doing an uprage, because:
I wouldn't dare to do a real upgrade but install 11i and integrate the old data.
I've done that a few times.

I've never tried the upgrade, so I have no data on how long it takes, but 7hrs is quite a lot.

The apparently unsupported adapter is the A3740 - I recently bought two of them and from what I read (afterwards *sigh*) they're no longer supported.

[BUPA IS]

Luckily for us we have Tachyon 5158A FA's in the host so don't have the problem of unsupported adaptors. Unfortunately on the V class we couldn't upgrade the boot disks to 15K rpm disks as suggested previously because the V class doesn't support the most modern disks. The old disks we are running on will mean the upgrade runs slower then on a more modern set of hardware. After thinking about the upgrade plans for a couple of days we are now going to go with the 'normal' upgrade process as documented by HP rather then try anything too complex. Our preference is to try the upgrade rather then the option of doing a fresh install and manually copy configuration data over because the amount of things we would need to copy over is fairly high and we have had success with doing upgrades in the past. James - BuPA IS.

[Ian Vaughan]

Hmmm,
Considering the support costs of a V-class I bet you could cost justify a new machine over 3 years. Especially seeing how many tpm's you can squeeze out of a rp4440 these days. With a new machine you could do a parallel run with 11i on the new machine, get your new system built at your leisure and have a cutover of just a few hours in the middle of a Saturday night.
Just thinking "outside the box".
HTH
Ian