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.